The Progress of Insight

You can read The Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw's The Progress of Insight right here online.  It's pretty short and very interesting if you are actively meditating.  It is not, however, an introductory meditation text.  For that, you should read his Practical Insight Meditation.  And if you don't meditate at all, then this is unlikely to be very interesting, since it would essentially be like reading a map of Mars.   Which maybe conversely suggests that if you're someone who gets into reading maps of Mars, you might also like meditating?

I got turned on to Sayadaw by reading Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.  In fact, that book is mainly a much longer re-write of the stages of insight laid out in The Progress of Insight.  These books are two examples of what is apparently an ancient genre that maps the levels a meditator passes through on their path towards enlightenment.  

If that last sentence -- with its mention of "levels" of insight that implicitly ascend towards a peak called "enlightenment" -- bothers you as it did me, then you might not want to read either of these books.  Because the truth is that meditation maps can cause problems.  Even their proponents would agree to this.  Thinking in terms of levels and progress and what should happen as you meditate can lead you down a variety of dead ends.  I can relate to some of these problems because I have felt them myself.  You can start mis-shaping would should be a personal empirical exploration to fit someone else's normative experience of meditation.  You can get caught up in comparing your level to others'.  Even without this competition, you can get stuck desperately grasping at the experience that would signify your progress to the next level, which can backfire, blocking that very progress. 

And yes, I just used the word "progress" in a way nearly indistinguishable from the one I was moments ago critiquing.  Because the truth is that you will progress in meditation, just the way you can progressively improve any skill you consciously practice.  I have also seen this progress for myself.  It implies a clear comparison of levels -- I have no doubt that the level I was at when I started two years ago is "below" the level I'm at now.  With this comes a clear metric for speed as well -- I have no doubt that spending an hour a day practicing this skill improves it more "rapidly" than spending 15 minutes a day.  So, while I have a general mistrust of the word progress in connection with qualitative goals like enlightenment, I wouldn't want to deny the feeling that such a thing exists, even if I'm not at all sure where I'm progressing to.

But then, if you can see this progress for yourself as it gradually unfolds, and if knowing the hierarchy of this progress in advance may cause problems, why would anyone who has reached a point where they feel they can see the process in its totality think it helpful go back and write a complete description for those moving along the path they experienced?  

Ingram has a clear answer to this question.  He wrote his book partly because, working without a map, he himself became mired in some of the difficult stages along the path.  These are the stages he calls the "dark night of the soul" and which correspond to Chapter 6: Purification by Knowledge and Vision of the Course of Practice in Sayadaw's book.  These are, by all accounts, not fun.  Ingram, experiencing them as a fairly young guy, ended up having a lot of not fun for a fairly long time because he didn't understand that passing through these feelings can be a normal part of progressing.  So a lot of why he wrote the book was to normalize these potential feelings for others, by placing them in the context he could only discover for himself after the fact.  

Sayadaw also implicitly answers this question, though his answer is different.  Right at the outset he clarifies who his book is for.  Spoiler alert: I am not the intended audience.

It is meant for those who, by attending to these exercises, have gained progressive insight as well into the whole body-and-mind process arising at the six sense doors, and have finally come to see the Dhamma, to attain to the Dhamma, to understand the Dhamma, to penetrate the Dhamma, who have passed beyond doubt, freed themselves from uncertainty, obtained assurance, and achieved independence of others in the Master's dispensation.

There's a little footnote that clarifies this further.

The preceding sequence of terms is frequently used in the Discourses (Suttas) of the Buddha to refer to those individuals who have attained to the first supramundane stage on the road to arahantship, i.e., stream-entry (sotapatti), or the following ones. The term Dhamma refers here to Nibbana.

In other words, Sayadaw wrote the book for people who had already experienced everything in it once for themselves.  Many dangers of the map disappear in this context.  Instead, you're left wondering why anyone who already knew the terrain would need a map of it.  This too, Sayadaw clarifies, though implicitly, at the end of the book.

But although equanimity about formations has been attained, if the spiritual faculties have not yet reached full maturity, it just goes on repeating itself. Though he who has won (one of the lower) fruitions may be able to enter into it several times within one hour, yet if his spiritual faculties are immature, he cannot attain the next higher path within as much as one day, two, three, or more days. He abides merely in equanimity about formations. If, however, he then directs his mind to reach the fruition already attained, he will reach it perhaps in two or three minutes.

 

When, however, the spiritual faculties are mature, one who carries out the practice of insight for attaining to a higher path will find that immediately after equanimity about formations has reached its culmination, the higher path and fruition arise in the same way as before (i.e., as at the time of the first path and fruition), that is to say, it is preceded by the stages of adaptation and maturity. After the fruition, the stages of reviewing, etc., that follow are also the same as before.

 

Anything else concerning the method of practice for insight and the progress of knowledge right up to arahantship can be understood in precisely the same way as described. Hence there is no need to elaborate it any further.  

Arahantship, the final stop on the train, is the terminology for full enlightenment (though I gather there's some discussion of whether the Buddha himself was even more enlightened than this).  In Sayadaw's Theravadan tradition of buddhism, it would be the fourth path.  The first path, the first "supermundane stage on the road", is when you have completed the stages 1-18 one time.  To become an arahant, you have to do this three more times, but apparently each lap has the same structure as the first.  It makes perfect sense, then, for someone who knows the territory like the back of their hand to organize a map of it for someone who has only covered the ground just once, but who will need to traverse it again.

Since I have never experienced anything like the temporary cessation event of Nibbana that he describes in stage 12, I'm really not the target audience for Sayadaw's book.  I can relate reasonably well to the early stages.  Mind and Body.  Causation.  Arising.  Passing Away.  Even Dissolution, Fear, and Disgust.  These I have all experienced in varying degrees.  I can't say they've really been laid out in clear successive stages though, so I certainly couldn't tell you what level I think I'm at.  

Which begs the question of what I think of his map.  Since I'm not the target audience, it's probably not fair to judge whether the map is accurate.  In fact, since I can't even identify which stage I'm at, maybe I'm not on the map at all.  Maybe this is because the map is wrong, or just one possible map and not the map.  Or maybe it's because I haven't practiced enough to understand it.  I'll punt on judging the map and just tell you about the dangers and uses I've found for it so far.

I touched on some dangers earlier.  At first I was very resistant to this whole idea of Enlightenment as the endpoint of a series of stages.  The very first map I came across was the very different one in Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated.  While that book was actually very interesting, it also had a whiff of "Enlightenment in 10 easy steps!", free with your purchase of ginsu knives.  Having since strongly felt the progress of practicing a skill, I have softened on the idea that there can be levels.  I'm still wary of the implied endpoint though.  Maybe that could be reinterpreted as gradually rewiring the brain enough that you eventually do unconsciously whatever it is that you did consciously all those years as you sat on your cushion?  I don't know that this would qualify you as a religious guru, but it might at least define some sort of endpoint or plateau to the process.  Automatic meditation.  But mostly for me, the implied endpoint -- interpreted as constantly feeling anything like the highly altered state of minute 56 of my meditation -- feels so far away that the issue doesn't seem urgent.  

The other danger I mentioned was the tendency to grasp at the experience you've read signifies the next level.  This has a natural egotism to it.  I want to improve.  I want to feel like I'm better than I was.  So I want to have this particular experience, say, seeing a light, as proof that, yeah, I'm a meditative badass.  This can get in the way of just having the damn experience.  This is a little difficult to separate from another natural reaction, which is reflective of our fascination with novelty.  I in particular like to have new (for me) ideas.  To some extent in my meditation I'm always searching for a shiny new altered state.  This isn't to prove my level, but just because I enjoy the feeling of a new vista opening up.  Though I also feel smart in proportion to how often new vistas open up in my head, and I am very committed to feeling smart, so there's some ego to this aspect as well.  At any rate, I've noticed that my excitement on feeling some interesting new sensation can be multiplied by the possibility that this one marks a whole new level I've read about.  The two together can result in my being distracted by the feeling of excitement while the original sensation slips out the back door.  Once I've understood this danger of course, it becomes just one more feeling to be noted.  It comes and goes like every other, and isn't that dangerous.  

I've found the maps most useful when I dispense entirely with the idea of levels and progress, and think of the 'stages' as more literally features I might come across while wandering through my meditative landscape.  On your right, you can see the way your itch is shadowed by the intention to make the movement that scratches it.  To your left, if you squint, you can make out how there's a tiny feeling of fear as some new altered perception begins to form.  Sometimes these drugs are a bit too good.  If you go far enough down this valley, there's a spot where you can catch new experiences just as they hatch, at the singular inflection point where an inhale begins.  And if you go even further, you can follow it to where the river empties into the ocean and each sensation disappears.  There are obviously relationships amongst these various features of the landscape -- eg. it seems obvious to notice that sensations arise before you notice that they pass away -- but it seems secondary to arrange them in some overall order.  They are just things to look out for that you might miss on first glance.

For the moment, this is even how I would interpret stages that I have yet to experience.  I have been noticing a general lightening of my visual field as a meditation progresses, as if someone were turning up the dimmer switch.  At first, I thought this way simply the timing of the dawn as I faced out my window.  But the dawn changes time every day, often barely happens in Seattle at this time of year, and anyhow, I turned around to face inside -- this light is not the dawn.  And the weird purple spot that seems lately to appear just at the end of each meditation is also not from staring at the sun.  Without the maps getting me thinking about lights, I might have been slower to notice these, and I think there's little chance I'm inventing them just based on what I read.  So I count noticing these (relatively) quickly as a useful byproduct of my reading.

Likewise, is my recent experience of a sort of split in my consciousness between a bright, stable, empty expanse of light to my left and an ongoing stream on sensations to my right some pre-taste of cessation?  I've had some experience of "patchwork space" before, but not where there is qualitatively different stuff going on in each space.  I have no idea whether any of these experiences are the sign of anything.  But they are interesting in themselves, and I might have missed them if I hadn't already been primed to think about how odd it was that nothing was occurring in half my perceptual universe.

His consciousness, while carrying on the practice of bringing to mind (i.e. noticing), passes beyond the continuous occurrence of phenomena and alights upon non-occurrence. 

A Path With Heart

A Path With Heart: A guide through the perils and promises of spiritual life by Jack Kornfield.

I picked this up because Daniel Ingram made positive mention of it in his interesting Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.  I'm on a kick to read a wide variety of buddhist and meditation literature recently, and since Kornfield is one of the pillars of Western Buddhism and co-founders of IMS, I figured I should give this one a shot.

The right adjective to describe this book is undoubtedly "wise".  For some reason that has become a bit of a strange term in our culture.  Smart. Efficient. Creative. Powerful. Maybe even Mindful, these days.  These are terms we seem more comfortable with.  But Wisdom?  The depth of experience and nuanced integration of many perspectives for which there is no substitute and no shortcut?  Dude, come on, I've got a 10am here.  Wisdom sounds to us like some cockamamie Greek idea.  Something from the vapid hippy past of the self-help genre, from before it was colonized by the 7 most highly effective colored parachutes you need to find your cheese.

Kornfield is unapologetically wise though, which does make this book read like a self-help manual.  It's filled with poems and aphorisms and stories drawn from his own life and the lives of other spiritual voyagers from many traditions (noumenauts?).  It aims to inspire you to start down a spiritual path, or to continue ever-deeper down one you've already embarked on.  Generally, I quite enjoyed all these inspirational aspects, though they do serve to make the book a bit long and sometimes repetitive.  I guess it just feels means to edit wisdom with ruthless red ink.

This means that the book is not really a good introductory guide to meditation per se.  He's not really focused on teaching you to meditate.  He does provide a number of different meditations that deal with loving-kindness, forgiveness, the separate compartments we create in our lives, etc ...  But these are really just meant to be food for thought to get us to reflect more deeply on these topics.  He basically presumes either that you already meditate or that his words will inspire you to go to a class and get some basic instruction.

Kornfield is really more focused on why we meditate than how.  What is it that we're looking to get out of mindfulness?  How do we integrate what we learn by sitting with our eyes closed into our daily lives?  How can we make sure that our technical development as meditators leads us down a path with heart, one that connects us to the world with a sense of sacredness.  All of his 'spiritual perils' crop up when our path (inevitably, in his view, but hopefully temporarily) loses this heartfelt orientation.  In fact, one of the nicest aspects of the book is the glimpse we get of the bumps along his own meditative path.  Jack Kornfield has lost his way many times on the path towards wisdom.  He speaks convincingly of the many cycles of deepening self-examination that constitute his vision of the spiritual life.  At its core, the book can be judged right from its cover; it is dedicated to admiring that great flower of the self-help genre -- walking the path is the destination

A New Axiomatic

Thus, in the morning, before the books piled high on my table, to the god of reading, I say my prayer of the devouring reader: ‘Give us this day our daily hunger . . .’ 

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

DRAFT: The Second Coming of Capitalism

So I read two interesting economics books recently.  The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee and the now-so-famous-it's-in-famous Capital in the 21st Century, by socialism's newest bad boy Thomas Piketty.  Unless you've been living under a rock for the last six months, I'll assume that you're as familiar with the latter as the rest of the Twitterati.  The former, while listed by Amazon as a best-seller, seems to have gotten less attention and perhaps requires some introduction.  

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are a couple of (only modestly, from the looks of the dust jacket) bearded professor types from MIT.  There's probably some more biographical information at the beginning of this book talk they gave, if you're into that stuff, and the type who prefers the fast and loose shoddiness of the public performance of economics. At any rate, they wrote an interesting book in the techno-optimistic genre, arguing that we are on the cusp of a new machine age, driven by artificial intelligence, that will be as consequential as the first and second industrial revolutions (#1 being basically the steam engine and #2 being electricity, internal combustion, chemicals and everything else, according to Vaclav Smil).  While optimistic, however, the book is not utopian, and they also try to figure out what all this new technology will mean for employment and equality.  You might see the whole thing as an expansion of the could-be-apocryphal exchange between Henry Ford and the head of the UAW:

Ford -- "Look at this great new machine, it replaces 5 workers and never misses a shift.  How are you going to get that thing to pay union dues, eh?" 

Head of UAW -- "Very impressive Mr. Ford.  But how are you going to get it to buy your cars?"

My new write-a-review-of everything-I-read project got a little derailed when I started reading Piketty before I had written something about B. and McA.  But sometimes these little setbacks are just what we need to take a giant step forward.  The books make a natural complement in my mind because they offer related meditations on what we're coming to see is the big question of 21st century capitalism -- what sort of relation will there be between growth and inequality? 

So here goes a joint review of the next 100 years.

...

Shit happens.  

...

DRAFT: Ubiquity

I recently read Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity.  It had some interesting ideas, though was certainly one of those books that would be better confined to the dust jacket (aside: why is it that we complain of people's shortening attention span and continual content hopping when in fact much of the problem is the over-production of filler content -- many books could easily be compressed into the space of a longish essay; they only publish them as books because we have a poor system for monetizing essays; is it any wonder then that we read them very quickly, trying to extract the nugget from the inevitable cruft in the most efficient way we can?  We read blogs this way too; again because it doesn't pay to edit them -- to wit, did you really just read this parenthesis?).  

Anyhow, the book is mostly a pop science restatement of the idea of self-organized criticality as originally expounded by Per Bak,  and if you are familiar with his work there's little new ground here, scientifically speaking.  Buchanan takes the basic sand pile metaphor at the heart of SOC and follows the trail of various folks who have modeled systems like forest fires, earthquakes, extinctions, and the spread of scientific citation, all with similar algorithms.  He does an able job of summarizing the research, and if you're unfamiliar with the curious power laws that relate the size of these events to their frequency, this is a good place to begin.  The upshot is that certain systems appear to be scale invariant, meaning that there is no natural unit of size with which to describe them (just a restatement of the fact that the statistics of their variation obey a power law, that they have "long tails", that their standard deviation is infinite, etc ...). 

The first thing that I find odd about his discussion is that it's simply not true, at least from a very general perspective.  While it's empirically certain that variations in all of these systems obey a power law over several orders of magnitude, they do not go on to scale indefinitely.  Perhaps there is no smallest earthquake, but there is most certainly a largest one, constrained by the thermal energy of the planet in the ultimate instance.  And the same is true of all the systems he discusses.  Every chart he shows of a power law distribution of events has a nice straight line in the middle range, but inevitably tails off at some very large and very small magnitude/probability.  In other words, real systems do have some characteristic scale, even if the range over which they appear not to is remarkably broad.  I'm not sure what to do with this observation, which doesn't invalidate any of the science but I think does pose some sort of problem for any attempt to reach general philosophical conclusions. 

The second odd omission (post Wolfram at least) for what is really a philosophical work at heart, is that he doesn't really emphasize the algorithmic nature of these models.  The original Per Bak et. al. paper was simply meant to demonstrate that a simple cellular automaton can produce complex and unpredictable seeming behavior that is nevertheless governed on a statistical level by a power law.  Doesn't this immediately lead you to want to know what other simple programs are out there that produce complex behavior?  Why focus on just this one algorithm?  Why not figure out what class of algorithms produce this type of behavior (short answer: those where local interactions can propagate through the whole system)?  Are there others that produce complex behavior whose statistics follows something other than a power law?

But never mind what was left out.  For me, the one new scientific idea in the book turns out to be the oldest part of the story, namely the discovery that critical phenomena have certain universality classes related to the renormalization group.  I had heard vaguely of this idea, perhaps because Laughlin mentioned it in passing in A Different Universe, but I hadn't understood that it applied as well to SOC models (obvious in retrospect of course).  I still don't know the mathematics behind this stuff, but the basic idea is that you can actually prove that, near a phase transition, most everything you might say about the microscopic details of a system is irrelevant.  Since the whole idea of self-organized criticality is that many systems actually seem to spontaneously hold themselves near a critical point, this seems an important defense of the usefulness of these models.  If a system does naturally approach a phase transition, then you may legitimately expect to describe many aspects of it with a toy model that has just a few variables.

The real thrust of the book, however, is philosophical, rather than scientific.  Buchanan spends some time explaining and justifying the research only to make it plausible, and is really more interested in drawing out the consequences of seeing the world in this way.  And it's here that I found his conclusions both appealing and strangely superficial.

I think the ideas are appealing for a couple of reasons.  First, they take us away from our typical banally linear notion of cause and effect.  

Step one in this is fairly simple, and you don't actually need any of these ideas to reach it, though they serve to reinforce the concept -- a lot of events we call causes are actually just triggers.  It's not useful to say that dropping the grain on the sand pile right there causes the avalanche any more than it is to say that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand caused WWI.  If we have a spliff and some spare time, we can argue about whether it's "true" or not, but it's definitely not useful.

Step two is a bit more subtle, though I think is actually entailed in step one, and this is to realize that big effects don't necessarily have big causes. This is something he harps on repeatedly throughout the book, bludgeoning the point home.  Nothing about a big fire, a big avalanche, a big stock market crash or a big extinction event is at all special in terms of its trigger.  Our typical confusion between cause and trigger makes us imagine these events as special, and to look for special causes for them.  In fact, these events aren't special in size, statistically speaking (the whole idea of a power law distribution being that there is no standard deviation that would mark an event as an outlier -- bigger events happen less frequently, but no size event is "inconceivable") and their causes aren't special either (the system is always poised at a critical state where any old grain of sand is capable of generating an avalanche of any size).  

So, basically, shit happens.

I find this conclusion appealing partly because it strips away our belief that we know why shit happens.  What we invent with all our laws and explanations and study of history are simply rules of thumb.  The underlying mechanism, though, is a tremendous seething mass of complexity that only occasionally organizes itself enough to reveal its patterns if we squint just right. Seeing the real world as the execution of a simple algorithm with surprising results does a lot to undo the enlightenment humanism that has led us astray.   

But of course, observing that shit happens is also rather superficial.  

DRAFT: When did the Singularity happen?

The quote in that last post was from a book called Accelerando (Singularity) by Charlie Stross.  As you might imagine from the title, the book is about the moment when humans cease to be the most intelligent life form on the planet.  Or, that's the short version at least.  Because the more you dig into this idea (which I admit to being perhaps unhealthily obsessed with) the longer it gets.  Maybe the easiest way to see this is to ask yourself how exactly you will know when the singularity has happened?  It sounds like it would be so obvious, right?  I mean, it's a singularity after all; who is going to remain unaware that they've just fallen into a black hole?

Our culture, being deeply Christian at base, imagines everything in terms of apocalypse.  We have spent at least 2000 years now scared stiff that the world is going to end because we are sinners.  Pop culture's treatment of the singularity is no different; it's just the Rapture for nerds.  The apocalypse, you'll note, never happens gradually.  The end of times might sneak up on you, or at least on those sinners who will be swept away by it, but when it finally happens there will be fire and brimstone type disasters accompanied by trumpets -- you're gonna fuckin' know it. You're not going to have to ask your neighbor whether that's the end of the fireworks display, and do you think they'll do an encore?

Now, it doesn't take a whole lot of philosophical or scientific reflection to realize that the Hollywood version of the singularity makes about as much sense as their version of Catholicism (aka Scientology).   But realizing that the Singularity won't have an the obvious climax of Tom Cruise film is only the first step in a long chain that unravels the entire concept.  If we define the Singularity as the moment when some new "artificial" intelligence that operates with greater speed arises on earth, then the Singularity has already happened, and is happening, and will continue to happen.  Life, humans, corporations, robots, maybe bacteriophages, all qualify.  The Singularity is actually a whole set of nested singularities, so many limits or phase transitions that divide one type of intelligence from another.

DRAFT: Olson

PREFACE: I'm cleaning out drafts of various posts that I have sitting in gmail because, let's be honest, these are never going to get finished now that I'm writing FPiPE.  Accordingly, your mileage may vary.

So I just finished reading my favorite economist Mancur Olson's very first book The Logic of Collective Action (1965). This completes my reverse chronological reading of his books that began with Power and Prosperity (2000) and The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982).  I would highly recommend any of them individually; together they constitute one long train of very general thought about how groups organize and pursue their collective advantage. 

The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups

People usually assume that a group of people with a common interest will naturally organize themselves to collectively pursue that interest.  However, if the action of the group needs to be explained by the rational action of the individuals who compose it, it turns out that even a group with a clear common goal and a clear consensus about how to achieve it will NOT, in fact, always spontaneously organize for their collective benefit.  Often, in fact, they won't manage to get organized at all, and even if they do, they will tend to achieve an outcome for the group as a whole that is much worse than could be achieved if they were able to act as one unit.

Olson demonstrates this failure to spontaneously organize simply by examining the cost benefit calculation faced by an individual actor in a large group that has a collective interest in some common good.  By hypothesis we have a group of people with unanimous agreement on the value of a public, collective good.  In addition, the benefit of providing this group good exceeds the cost -- that is the benefit to the group taken as a whole exceeds the cost taken as a whole.  The group has a clear common incentive to provide this good for themselves.  However, if the good is truly public and non-excludable, that is, if it must be provided either for everyone at the same time or for no one at all, then each individual has an incentive to free-ride and let his neighbor front the cost of providing the good while he sits back and enjoys the inevitable benefits.  In a large group, a single individual's share of the benefits of a collective good will be very small, and their contribution to the cost will not in itself be enough to pay for the good.  If each individual operates in this rational cost-benefit maximizing way, nobody will pay for their share of the cost of the good, and the good will not be provided.  

You might think that Olson would link this analysis to the tragedy of the commons idea, or to the irrationality of voting, but in fact he begins the book by making a strict analogy between this situation and that of firms in a competitive industry trying to collude to collectively lower output and hence raise prices.  Theoretically, all the widget makers might have an interest in reducing volumes and forcing up the price of widgets.  However, if there are many widget makers, the incentive for each individual widget maker is to maintain their volumes but still reap almost the full benefit of the higher price created by the others' reductions.  After all, the volume of an individual widget maker is not large enough by itself to change the market price significantly, but the cost of a given maker's volume reduction is borne entirely by that individual.  It's rational for individual widget makers to run full tilt even if they would all be better off if they could collectively agree to reduce output, which is of course why price moves toward marginal cost in these types of markets.

I think it pays to spend a little time letting that idea soak in.  Economists think that incentives matter.  But incentives for whom?  If we take individual incentives as the unquestioned atoms, as it were, of our economic system, then the behavior of any group will need to be explained by some mechanism that harnesses those incentives.  The group has to be created and held together, and for that you need some sort of mechanism.  Olson shows us that our often implicit assumption that groups will act just like big individuals is based on "anthropomorphising" the incentives we think drive individuals.