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Ah. Yeah, I agree with your point that if someone is claiming that the secular interpretation of Buddhism is The True Interpretation and you can see that even in the original sources, that's a reason to be doubtful of them. They are, as you say, laundering their own ideas with the reputation of Buddhism.
I think the difference is that I don't think I ever put sources like MCTB in the category of writers who make claims about the original meaning of the suttas. Though it's certainly possible that those claims were there and I just glossed over them. (And okay, admittedly the whole name of the book is reasonable to read as making a claim about what the original meaning of the teachings was.) But I read you to be saying something like "treat these modern secular writers as people who might be drawing inspiration from some Buddhist sources but are fundamentally doing their own new thing", and I think that I was already reading many of them as doing exactly that.
With regard to MCTB specifically, this felt especially clear with Ingram including a chapter trashing the whole traditional Theravada conception of enlightenment and then following it up with a chapter presenting his own revised model as a replacement. That felt like him basically saying "yeah fuck those original religious guys, let's do something different, here's a model based on my own personal experience instead".
Anyway I agree that it's good to point that out for anyone who missed that, or who interpreted books like MCTB differently.
Oh oops, it wasn't. Fixed, thanks for pointing it out.
Some time back, Julia Wise published the results of a survey asking parents what they had expected parenthood to be like and to what extent their experience matched those expectations. I found those results really interesting and have often referred to them in conversation, and they were also useful to me when I was thinking about whether I wanted to have children myself.
However, that survey was based on only 12 people's responses, so I thought it would be valuable to get more data. So I'm replicating Julia's survey, with a few optional quantitative questions added. If you have children, you're welcome to answer here: https://forms.gle/uETxvX45u3ebDECy5
I'll publish the results at some point when it looks like there won't be many more responses.
However, my understanding of the life review experience is that it's the phenomenological correlate of stopping a bunch of the active cognitive processing we employ to dissociate. In order to "unsee" something (i.e., dissociate from it), you still have to see it enough to recognize that it's something you're supposed to unsee, and then perform the actual work of "unseeing". What I'm proposing is that all the work that goes into "unseeing" halts during a life review, and all the stuff that would originally have gotten seen-enough-to-get-unseen now just gets seen directly, experienced in a decentralized and massively parallel fashion.
That doesn't seem to match the account in the trip report you linked, though, which seems to involve processing a lot of things in a time-consuming linear fashion. E.g.:
It took me through my best friend’s passing something like 20 times. First person. Just relive it and rewind it and relive it and rewind it and relive it and rewind it again. And the Teafaerie is screaming “How many times do I have to do this?!”
To which the voice did not hesitate for a moment before replying, “Until you can stay present.”
It took me a few more rounds. I never lost sight of the feeling that it was trying to help me, though.
I don't know if this was what the people had in mind, but one consideration is that being poor is often stressful, e.g. if you're constantly worried about whether you'll be able to afford the month's rent. And chronic stress is bad for your health.
I generally liked the "Goodness of Reality" section quite a bit, and this part especially made me go "oh, of course!":
I think Christianity’s emphasis on forgiving all, Taoism’s emphasis on not resisting anything, Buddhism’s emphasis on being equanimous with everything, and Islam’s emphasis on submitting to all aspects of God’s will are different ways of talking about the same general thing.
I was less convinced about several of the other sections. I agree that there's a loose sense in which we reap what we sow, in that actions that are derived from tanha tend to create more tanha, whereas non-tanha-based motivation tends to create more non-tanha-based motivation. But I thought the suggestion that everyone inevitably experiences a life review felt unconvincing (largely due to similar reasons as habryka).
It also felt to me like the post was trying to argue for everyone's morality converging in the end, which I'm skeptical of. I do think that there are some paths that do converge, but also others that do not. One big example would be the ideological difference between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, where Theravada tends to lean toward just ending your own personal suffering and "noping out" of reality, whereas Mahayana tends to have more of a "get enlightened and remain around to help all sentient beings" ideal. A meditation teacher I recently spoke with mentioned that this divergence tends to be reflected in his students. Some of them become increasingly dedicated to helping everyone else as a result of their practice, while others take more of a "well if everything is just arbitrary sensations, I might as well spend the rest of my life just playing video games" type approach (even if he actively tries to nudge them toward the more compassionate route). He speculated that the divergence seems to be driven by personality factors, but he hadn't identified which ones exactly.
I've now read about one-third of "In the Words of the Buddha". I personally appreciated getting the additional sociological and historical background so I'm happy that you recommended it and that I got it. However, its talk about reincarnation and realms of divine beings and so on doesn't really do much to convince me differently about this:
monks in robes teaching Buddhism, who accept religious and supernatural elements, are dismissed as religious men.
I think the book is, if anything, dissuading me from the idea that modern Western practitioners would benefit from spending time familiarizing themselves with the Pali Canon. (Assuming that they don't have, like me, an interest in its history for its own sake.)
I had previously been somewhat influenced by some of the Western apologetics and meditation teachers who said things like "no, Buddhism is really a philosophy rather than a religion, you can read it secularly and interpret all the stuff about rebirth etc. metaphorically". Whereas the impression I get from the book is that it really is a religion complete with all the supernaturalness and superstition, and that even the more secular parts like the moral advice contain bits we'd rather ignore, such as the Buddha mentioning that one good type of wife is the one who's like a slave (with even the editor of the book including a footnote that says it's a good thing later Buddhists have ignored this recommendation). I now think the people saying that you can really just read the stuff metaphorically are cherry-picking the bits that happen to fit the framework they're in favor of.
Now there were some pieces of advice I liked there too, but overall the task of figuring out what can be trusted seems hard enough that one would be better off by just ignoring the whole thing and going with what we've learned about meditation in more secular contexts, as reported by people with more reliable epistemics. Of course such people aren't completely trustworthy either, as you point out by e.g. Culadasa's sex scandal. But then nobody is and the fact that we can witness the way their practice goes wrong when embedded in the context of Western householder life seems like a good way of refining our models further, whereas the Pali Canon is fitted into a very different cultural and historical context that we don't actively observe.
Is there something that I'm missing?
a friend shared this illustrative trip report.
From the report:
I could move the little thumbnails around. I also remember trying to decide if it was safe to drag a memory into the Trash folder, and intending to do this with something that I deemed to be relatively inconsequential. But now I honestly don’t remember what it was.
😅
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Great post!
I think Claude's version of this point is better, mainly due to it not using the word "output"; that's a programming/computer science term that I expect the average person to not understand (at least not in this kind of a context). "Do what we want" is much clearer.