In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.
EDIT: I didn't mean this as a rebuttal. Yvain is being brave posting this, and I don't mean to jump on him.
Here is the best source I can find: http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/36/04717208/0471720836.pdf This appears to be the first chapter of iCon by Jeffrey Young and William Simon.
The story of Jobs in India starts on page 23.
From page 25: “We weren’t going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened. It was one of the first times that I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Baba put together.”
A quote by Crowley (The Confessions of Aleister Crowley) may apply to some of the comments here:
"The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach."
I suspect that mystical experience, yoga and drugs are underestimated by rationalists, because of their associations with the new age crazies.
It's a mistake, the same as if one downplayed quantum mechanics because of the countless crazy new age "interpretations" of QM.
Yes, I feel properly guilty posting this on a rationalism site
Um... why is guilt proper here? Rationalists win, Bayesians condition on all evidence, and so on.
I'm glad to see this. Crowley was a very accurate observer in many cases.
Henk Barendregt wrote a recent account; he's a professor of math and computer science at Nijmegen (Netherlands) and an adjunct at CMU.
The comment that this is about developing skills is very accurate. Drugs can induce similar states but they don't help to develop the cognitive control skills. Unfortunately we have very few disciplines that teach the development of cognitive self-management without a lot of peculiar window dressing.
Regarding Crowley's comment on his later experi...
Sam Harris has made similar comments about Eastern spirituality.
Additionally, many descriptions I've read of what people have experienced during meditation are disturbingly similar to this woman's experience of having a stroke.
Sadly the link to Crowley's work is no longer valid. I've also tried the wayback machine - which also does not have a record of the link.
Crowley wrote a lot, so I'm unsure where to even begin looking for the particular essay you refer to here. Can you give me a clue where I might start?
I think you'll also find this relevant.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Hrm... Interesting, though having read this I find myself actually a bit scared of such states.
What I mean is this: I have this vague suspicion from reading Crowley's essay that it basically all these exercises, among other things, effectively hack both our goal systems and the part of ourselves that, well, keeps track of what's "us" vs something else. While messing with that a bit may be a potentially interesting experience, I'm not sure it'd be a good idea to end up in a state where some earlier selected arbitrary object is then identified with me... That is, to the point that I think of that object as myself just as much as, well, any other part of me.
Or maybe I'm being stupid here?
What I'm saying is that I'm not sure this doesn't amount to, well, hacking my goal system in a bad way, in a way I ought to be rationally terrified of.
And I think actually ending up in a state where I think of such and such random object as "actually me", is itself perhaps a bad thing unless it's brief or I can remember and act on the knowledge that it's not.
ie, if I was uploaded, and a convenient little interface was handed to me that let me click a button to twiddle what amounts to the pleasure centers in my brain, I'd want to do the equivalent of run away screaming rather than try it once.
Because once is enough to start poking and prodding at the reinforcement mechanisms/goal system of my brain, etc etc...
ie, now it's not all that obvious to me that these states don't amount to a crude form of "hacking my own mind into a limited wirehead state"
Which, of course, once it happens, will be in such a way that it would also trigger the stuff that gives a sense of satisfaction of "job well done", thus I'll end up believing it to be noble, wonderful, etc etc etc...
This is the nature of my concern. Perhaps it's silly, but having read Crowley's essay, that's ...
But... why?
Suppose there is such a thing as spiritual enlightenment that is not captured by conventional religion, suppose neither Eliezer nor Adam get it. Further, suppose you attain it. Sure, it's a novel experience, but so are drugs for many folks. What do you expect to get out of it?
"No free lunch" is a basic tenet in knowledge acquisition. Want to know how life emerged? I'm sure we can all suggest books, university courses, museums, documentaries... but meditation? Mysticism? Yogis? They all may be a wonderful experience, with a feel of enli...
they cannot impart any novel knowledge apart from themselves
It's not knowledge, it's skill at self-control and self-awareness. And like most other skills (riding a bicycle, driving a car, etc.) you can't acquire them by reading about them or simply thinking that you already know how to do them.
One of the most pernicious biases of the human brain -- pernicious because it interferes with self-improvement -- is that your brain believes it can always intuitively predict its own responses to mental and physical actions that it has never actually taken.
This means that, even when a self-improvement book includes a technique that produces some useful, novel result, most people will never actually try it, versus just reading about it and imagining that they know what it would have been like if they'd tried it... and concluding that it wouldn't do anything!
And meditation is absolutely in this category. There's a world of difference between intellectually "knowing" how much dreck your brain is putting out, and the practical experience of sitting there and listening to it, day after day, and realizing just how utterly stupid you are... it's also an active discouragement from l...
If I may make a suggestion (both to the author and to the commenters): why not devote less words to people and more to the issues.
I think it irrelevant whether this Crowley guy was an addict or an evangelical, or whatever. What matters are the issues. I would have liked to read more about what exactly Yvain believes and why, and less about some trip to Asia and parents of a person I never heard off and frankly don't care about.
PS don't hesitate to summarize Godel, Escher Bach. It might be helpful. And why not summarize the bible while you're at it. Who cares. If anyone does mind, they are free to read the original, right? No one loses anything.
This seems like the right thread to add some info about zen meditation ("zazen") for those who are interested in trying it. These are some pages from an american zen master's website: how to sit zazen and stretches to get to the lotus position.
What I find interesting about zazen is that the emphasis is entirely on posture, with nothing that the practitioner is supposed to think or do, and this is said to have a "balancing" effect on the mind. Having tried it for about a week I can say that it does seem to induce a state of somewhat rela...
Chaos magic is a fascinating subject of study, particularly if you seek out the practitioners who believe (correctly, to my mind) that it has nothing to do with "magic" or changing the world and everything to do with psychological effects and changing your own mind.
Take a look at Wikipedia's entry on the subject to get a general handle on the concept.
I wonder about myself.
I see no attraction or have any desire to experience any of the things people describe as enlightenment, religious experience, or spirituality.
Is this because of those things association with religion/new-age crazy people/general scam artists, or is it because I'm just different from those who see some attraction to them?
I can't seem to figure it out. On the one hand, I find myself agreeing with many of the things Yvian posts. This makes me think maybe I've been biased by the religion/new-age crazy people/general scam artists association. On the other hand, I really, really try to correct for such a bias...to little effect.
Thanks for the post. I haven't had time to read it all yet, but I was particularly interested in the following:
"We assert that the critical phenomenon which determines success is an occurrence in the brain characterized essentially by the uniting of subject and object"
This is extremely remniscent of Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality, and seems (superficially) similar to what I understand of Zen. The fact that so many spiritual systems seem to share this fact is intriguing to say the least.
People with artistic aspirations sometimes use practices similar to Crowley's to "break the mold of technique" and actually find something worthwhile to express. For example, a good way to come up with interesting musical lines is a kind of half-dream state, but you need trained attention to avoid drifting or forgetting what you hear.
(I independently came to the same conclusion re Crowley a few days ago, for whatever that's worth.)
EK (expected karma): 0.5
Reply to: The Sacred Mundane, BHTV: Yudkowsky vs. Frank on "Religious Experience"
Edward Crowley was a man of many talents. He studied chemistry at Cambridge - a period to which he later attributed his skeptical scientific outlook - but he soon abandoned the idea of a career in science and turned to his other passions. For a while he played competitive chess at the national level. He took to mountain-climbing, and became one of the early 20th century's premier mountaineers, co-leading the first expedition to attempt K2 in the Himalayas. He also enjoyed writing poetry and travelling the world, making it as far as Nepal and Burma in an era when steamship was still the fastest mode of transportation and British colonialism was still a thin veneer over dangerous and poorly-explored areas.
But his real interest was mysticism. He travelled to Sri Lanka, where he studied meditation and yoga under some of the great Hindu yogis. After spending several years there, he achieved a state of mystical attainment the Hindus call dhyana, and set about trying to describe and promote yoga to the West.
He was not the first person to make the attempt, but he was certainly the most interesting. Although his parents were religious fanatics and his father a fundamentalist preacher, he himself had been an atheist since childhood, and he considered the vast majority of yoga to be superstitious claptrap. He set about eliminating all the gods and chants and taboos and mysterian language, ending up with a short system of what he considered empirically validated principles for gaining enlightenment in the most efficient possible way.
Reading Crowley's essay on mysticism and yoga at age seventeen rewrote my view of religion. I had always wondered about eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, which seemed to have some underlying truth to all their talk of "enlightenment" and "meditation" but which seemed too vague and mysterious for my liking. Crowley stripped the mystery away in one fell swoop.
When listening to Eliezer debate Adam Frank on "religious experience", I was disappointed but not surprised to hear just how little they had to say. Even Frank, who was fascinated enough to write a book about it, considered it little more than a sense that something was inspiring or especially impressive. I quoted a bit of Crowley's essay on the thread, and people seemed to like it and want to know more.
But I am very reluctant to share, and do so now only after being specifically requested by a few people. You see, I have been trying to paint a sympathetic view of Crowley over the past few paragraphs. With the unsympathetic view you are familiar already. Under his nickname "Aleister", he wrote some of history's most influential occultist works. Even in this domain, he held himself to a high rationalist standard, recording that he tested each spell and ritual beforehand and passed on only the ones that actually worked as advertised.
...I don't know what that means either. Either he was one of those psychopaths gifted with the ability to lie perfectly and absolutely, or a psychotic genius able to induce hallucinations in himself at will. Crowley himself occasionally endorsed this latter explanation, but after pondering it a while decided he didn't care. The important thing, he wrote, was to determine what techniques produced what results. After that, the philosophers could determine whether they were physical or mentally mediated. Besides, he said, the entities he summoned were so different from himself that if they represented faculties of his mind, they were ones to which he had no conscious access.
My point is that I am going to link you to Crowley's essay on mysticism, yoga, and religious experience, and that you might get more out of it if you tried to avoid any bias upon seeing the name "Aleister Crowley" on the title page. Yes, I feel properly guilty posting this on a rationalism site, but if we're going to talk about religious experience we might as well listen to the people who have had some.
Although it is Less Wrong tradition to rewrite a theory rather than simply link to it, it would be inappropriate in this case. Getting Crowley filtered would be like having someone summarize Godel, Escher Bach to you - you might learn a few things, but you'd lose the chance to enjoy the superb writing. It's a long essay, but not so long you can't read it in one sitting. Even just reading the Preface gives an idea of the theory. Without further ado: Crowley on Religious Experience.
I post this essay to clarify why I believe three things. First, that both Eliezer and Adam miss the point of religious experience. Second, that certain seemingly supernatural or silly beliefs can be more reasonable than they appear (see for example Crowley's explanation of religious laws on "virtue" and "purity"). Third, that some mystics' work is of sufficient relevance to rationalists to be worth study.