Is enlightenment real? (Part 1)

Have you heard about those guys actually trying to get enlightened?

Over a year ago I was talking with a friend of mine about learning and improving Japanese. Just as we were wrapping up, he asked me “have you heard about the subreddit /r/streamentry?” I said No.

He followed up with “Essentially there’s these non-monk guys who think the Buddhist concept of enlightenment is in fact real… and they’re dead set on achieving it.” This really piqued my interest because as a kid who was exposed to a reasonable amount of Zen Buddhism, I always thought enlightenment and “the end of suffering” sounded like a pretty sweet deal. (I also thought it meant you’d get some magic superpowers.) However, as far as I remember, Zen was not very helpful in understanding exactly what it was or how to do it. The stories of people becoming enlightened weren’t very helpful either - so and so gets enlightened while sweeping the steps of the temple, so and so child gets enlightened after the master cuts his finger off…

I asked my friend to elaborate and he said something along the lines of “It sounds like what happens is that through meditation, you become so keenly aware of exactly how each conscious piece of mental activity comes to be, that you realize that the concept of a “self” is just a superfluous piece of mental activity - like, the brain looks everywhere for a self, can’t find one, and then… implodes. This drastically changes how you perceive the world.”

Something about this caught my interest as a couple years prior I was interested in the topic of (the lack of) free-will and made a video on it.

That and, the idea of a somewhat concrete definition of enlightenment made it more interesting to investigate. What would happen thanks to learning from direct experience that there is no self I couldn’t quite imagine, but at least there was a starting point. (As opposed to the Zen’s “enlightenment is totally sweet but don’t worry too much about it.”)

My friend recommended the book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram so I picked it up and got going trying to decipher all kinds of terms and concepts from various denominations of Buddhism I had never heard of. The first thing that stood out to me was that there was a relatively clear roadmap to “awakening.” Daniel lists 15 stages you have to progress through to experience awakening. Actually, you have to go through these 15 stages 4 times because there are 4 levels of awakening. So, you can have a “partially awakened” person or a “fully awakened” person. (By the way these stages are from Theravadan Buddhism, not something that Daniel made up.)

In fact, Daniel Ingram himself was claiming to be a fully awakened person. His book says right on the cover: “The Arahant, Daniel Ingram” (Arahant is a Pali term referring to a fully awakened person.) I dug around on youtube and watched a couple interviews with Daniel and it sounded to me that one of the main permanent shifts in his perception was that he was experiencing the world without a central observer. So, rather than feeling like “you” are sitting in the cockpit that is your head, there’s no cockpit in your head and your head isn’t the center point of experience. Daniel said something like “Things just arise and pass away where they are.”

I don’t think many people could imagine what that’s like unless they’re advanced meditators or have experience with psychedelics. On the other hand, there may be some concrete changes in Daniel’s brain. Neuroscientist Judd Brewer and his team did some tests on Ingram and found that his default mode network was more or less… “off” by default. While not all bad, the default mode network is generally associated with ruminating, mind wandering - not being immersed in the present moment. A 2010 paper by Matt Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” (See my video below for elaboration on that)

Other papers ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4769634/ ) have found this default mode network rumination to be associated with perceived unhappiness.

So it sounds pretty sweet to have your default mode network switched off. Apparently the researchers needed Daniel to activate his default mode network to establish a baseline for their tests. They asked him to think some really neurotic thoughts about some terrible things that might happen in the future … but that didn’t do anything. Then he realized that he needed to switch off his default inclination of being aware of everything at once. The hum of the air conditioner, the whirs and beeps of the machines in the room, the rustle of his clothes, his breath and heartbeat - all these things that we would normally filter out as irrelevant, apparently it’s Daniel’s default to be aware of all things all at once. Once he finally shut out the stimulation from the room and restricted his awareness to only the neurotic thoughts in his head, he was able to get the machine to pick up some activity in his default mode network.

The other thing odd about Daniel was it seemed like he had a hyper fast perception of reality. Think about the refresh rate of a computer screen. Most movies are 24 frames a second and video games especially fighting games are usually 60 frames per second. If you could clearly discern the frames of a video game more clearly, that would surely make you much better at. So if the average player needs 20 frames to be able to react to an attack, then the types of attacks they can properly react to is quite limited. However if you speed up your frame rate perception and you’re down to 12 frames, you’re going to be able to have a far better defense than the average player. (Many players can guess what their opponent will do, but they can’t simply react)

Apparently Judd Brewer and his team were running this test on Daniel to see if there were any changes in his emotional reaction to things. IIRC, Daniel would be shown something in an incorrect orientation (say a house on its side) and he would hit one of the arrow keys on a keyboard to indicate the orientation it is in. So if a house was on its side with the roof pointing to the right, he would hit the right arrow key. An object would pop up, he’d hit the arrow key that corresponds to the object’s orientation and then the next object would pop up and this would repeat faster and faster. Somewhere else on the screen would appear some sort of gruesome image to see if him having an emotional reaction (disgust, surprise etc.) would affect his performance on the orienting task. What was interesting about this test was they set up their program to just keep getting progressively faster and faster to a point where it’s more or less humanly impossible to keep up with the speed at which the objects were appearing. So at that point they would just say the test was over when the computer started spraying out images at an imperceptible rate. Apparently with Daniel, to the bafflement of the researchers, things never got too fast. He just sort of …kept going. I actually heard about this from Daniel when I interviewed him (still not released) and he said something like “Yea I just synchronized the refresh rate of my consciousness with the refresh rate of the monitor.” (Seems like a pretty simple strategy, I think I’ll use it to get better at Tekken)

So is that enlightenment/awakening? I don’t know, but it sure got me interested in this idea that you can get permanent upgrades to your brain through meditation. This led to me doing a solo meditation retreat where I meditated for 10 hours a day for 10 days. Though, I chose not to do the same meditation technique as Daniel. I’ll tell you why in another post.

P.S. I asked Daniel if the “observerlessness” he was talking about was similar to psychedelic ego death, but he said that his only experience of ego death was so bizarre that he couldn’t make a comparison.

(Story to be continued in Part 2)