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"Is this…enlightenment?" I asked.

"We use the word 'Awakening'," said the Zen Master, kindly.

"Now what?" I asked, "Every book I've read about meditation is about getting to this point. There's nothing about how to safely navigate the territory afterward—or what to do afterward—or even what happens afterward."

"The first thing you need to know is that what you experienced was real," the Zen Master spoke from personal experience and that of his many previous students, "Don't make it too complicated. Just be in the moment. If you're cooking, then just cook. If you're eating, then just eat."

It is impossible to communicate the subjective experience of Stream Entry to someone who has not personally experienced at least kensho. However, it is possible to communicate an outside mechanistic model of what happens in your brain. First I will explain how a human brain functions normally. Then I will explain how a post-Awakening brain differs.[1]

Your brain creates a real-time simulation of you and world around you. Everything you consciously perceive is part of this model. There are no exceptions. How does this produce useful behavior? Because the brain enforces a 1-to-1 correspondence between the simulation and reality (where "reality" is defined as sensory inputs). If this 1-to-1 correspondence is adequately maintained, then performing an act in the simulation happens simultaneously as that same action happening in external physical reality. That's why if you die in the Matrix then you die in real life too.

If a brain just modeled the environment without performing any actions, then the whole model could exist as a non-cyclic graph. But a brain doesn't just model the world. It sends commands to muscles that act on the physical universe it's trying to model. What happens when a brain tries to anticipate its own motor commands? Now the brain's own algorithms are a causal force in the external environment it's trying to model. The result is computationally intractable.

In response, the brain divides its model of the universe into "things under its motor control" and "things not under its motor control". Those parts of the universe it can control coalesce into "self" and the rest coalesces into "other".

Other calculations involving self-reference become encapsulated too. This produces high-level abstractions including pain, pleasure and desire. These encapsulations feel like part of the self, because they involve self-reference, but they also feel like objective external truth, because they are not perceived as being under causal motor control.

There are many types of meditation[2], but most of them involve sitting still and all of them involve not taking self-motivated willful action on the external physical world. In other words, meditation is when you stop doing things that cause problematic self-reference in your world model.

When you do this, all of those abstractions created to contain problematic self-reference become unnecessary. Desire, pain, pleasure, self and other—they all no longer serve a purpose. Stop using them long enough, and your brain takes them apart, like disassembling a Lego set.

When you start meditating and sit in the full lotus position, your legs fall asleep and you feel a pain in them. After you've been meditating for years and sit in the full lotus position, your legs fall asleep and you feel the vibratory sensory inputs directly, without the encapsulation layer called "pain". The concept of "pain" is no longer a meaningful abstraction in your world model. Talking about pain to a yogi is like talking about "God" to an ex-Mormon.

Lots of models get dissolved. Prior to meditating, I felt like I was a small person walking around a region of Cartesian Space containing Planet Earth. Now I feel like a local region of local space is being created and destroyed around me like how the Minecraft game engine loads and unloads blocks. This happened because I got a direct enough perception of my own conscious reality that an illusion shattered and my perception shifted permanently. It was like going out-of-bounds in a videogame speedrun. You can never unsee the behind-the-curtain mechanics of how that reality is constructed.

But what really surprised me is what happened over a year later.

I'm autistic. Most of my life I've had trouble understanding other people and guessing how they want me to behave. In my late teens/early 20s, I studied history, anthropology, psychology and economics. This helped a bit.

Then a couple years ago I hit Stream Entry (aka Awakening) when I observed a bunch of my own mental processes that had been hidden from me. The internal workings of these parts of my mind had formerly been encapsulated away from my self-perception. But now I saw what they were doing. That reduced my subjective experience of suffering.

It also allowed me to infer these same processes in other people. Suddenly other people weren't confusing anymore! I could predict how someone's ego would react to the things I said before I said them.

This was useful because I could finally conduct probing psychological experiments on my friends. I had always wanted to know what people were thinking, but whenever I tried to ask, people would get hurt and defensive. Now I knew how to not trigger those defense mechanisms. That meant I could run a series of experiments where I sat my good friends down and tested how their minds worked. Not only did they not feel attacked, they usually felt that they'd been deeply heard, as if they'd been to a therapist. I could call a friend an idiot to his face and he'd shrug and go "yeah".

That solved one problem, but I still had my original autistic sensory disorder. Meditation was making it worse. Meditation makes you extra sensitive to sensory stimuli. Autism (I think) is caused by your sensory inputs having too much gain, in the audio signal-processing sense of the word "gain".

This continued for months. I bought the most comfortable clothes I could find. I installed blackout blinds over my windows. I bought a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones and wore them everywhere. I wore them so much I wore them out and bought a second pair. I wore earplugs to ballroom salsa dance.

Then the wave crested. A friend invited me to his birthday party with loud music where we played my first game of beer pong. I had to take a breather outside once or twice from the noise and chaos. But I felt…normal…for the first time in my life. I knew what the social expectations were and I followed them. This was different from my previous attempts to behave like a normal human being because I wasn't doing it on a cognitive level. It was just intuitive. My autistic sensory disorder was no longer overwhelming my social intuition instincts.

Since then, my sensory issues have gone into in freefall. I think I've had a successful round of meditation-instigated neural annealing. I went to a bar for New Year and didn't have any sensory issues at all. You know that stuff Dale Carnegie teaches about listening to people? It's easy after ego-death. I was told I had good vibes. Someone tried to buy me a beer. I lost track of how many people hugged me just because I had listened to them.

I felt like a Bene Gesserit trainee.


  1. This is my personal theory. Much of it is stolen from the excellent work of Steven Byrnes. I hope I am stating my claims precisely enough so that when the scientific establishment catches up, it can confirm or falsify my statements. ↩︎

  2. This includes the kind of prayer where you quietly listen to the thing called God. ↩︎

1.
^

I don't know if it's the same as you. I think I'm maybe not as active a listener? I don't think I'm incapable of the way I see you listen in your videos, but I'm not sure I put the energy into it.

2.
^

I use a visceral word because I don't approve of this practice in myself. Perhaps "ignore" or "block" would be more accurate?

1.
^

Possibly this was just idiosyncracy on their part. Other people have not expressed this feeling to me, so I have considered I'm putting too much weight on a single interaction.

1.
^

I don't know if it's the same as you. I think I'm maybe not as active a listener? I don't think I'm incapable of the way I see you listen in your videos, but I'm not sure I put the energy into it.

2.
^

I use a visceral word because I don't approve of this practice in myself. Perhaps "ignore" or "block" would be more accurate?

1.

Not just mental bandwidth. Physical capital too, like clothes made out of bamboo-rayon. ↩︎

1.
^

Possibly this was just idiosyncracy on their part. Other people have not expressed this feeling to me, so I have considered I'm putting too much weight on a single interaction.

1.

This is my personal theory. Much of it is stolen from the excellent work of Steven Byrnes. I hope I am stating my claims precisely enough so that when the scientific establishment catches up, it can confirm or falsify my statements. ↩︎

2.

This includes the kind of prayer where you quietly listen to the thing called God. ↩︎

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7 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

I follow most of the post, but got confused by the non-cyclic graph & halting problem/computational intractability part.

Is the non-cyclic graph a way of modelling causality as state transitions?

Re: computational intractability; I understand your argument as saying:

  1. Dualism is used as a fundamental interpretative tool, since it makes it tractable to analyze feedback loops between brain and environment.
  2. When meditating, dualism gets broken down due to lack of feedback loops and an increase in neutral annealing, leading to nondual world models

Questions: A. Why is the awakened brain capable of performing "computationally intractable" computation (non-dual & feedback loopy)? Seems more like an aptness thing than a fundamental impossibility thing (a la halting problem) B. Does all awakening-inducing meditative practices involve cutting feedback loops? Is awakening a theravada/Samantha thing?

Thank you for the excellent comment.

"Dualism is used as a fundamental interpretative tool" is a good way of putting it.

"When meditating, dualism gets broken down due to lack of feedback loops and an increase in neutral annealing, leading to nondual world models" ← Also yes.

What I was trying to get at with the non-cyclic graph stuff is that if all the brain did was non-causally model an external world, then it is always possible in principle to create a simulation where sensory inputs affect the simulation unidirectionally, and information flows through the simulation itself with no cycles. This is like how our weather prediction computers do not predictably affect the weather itself, or how planetariums do not affect the movement of the stars.

Embedded world optimizers are different. Your world model affect your motor outputs which affect the physical world which affects the world model. This is a cycle. In this way, non-embedded world optimizers such as chess engines (which are effectively stateless due to Minimax) differ from embedded world optimizers such as our brains, because embedded world optimizers cause cyclic causal loops when interacting with their environment. It's basically the Time Travel Paradox problem, except without any need for time travel. Your brain makes sense of this by scribbling "free will" over a link in the chain it doesn't want to look too closely at. By pretending this link is effectively random, it simplifies what appears to be an intractable self-referential problem into what appears to be (but isn't) a tractable non-self-referential one. Meditation temporarily breaks a link in the cycle by stopping the motor outputs where you make changes to the physical external world. Without that link in the cycle, the loop is cut and the causality becomes non-cyclic [while you're meditating].

Answer A: The computational intractability is a side effect of being an embedded world optimizer 𝓪 𝓫𝓪𝓵𝓵 𝓸𝓯 𝓷𝓮𝓾𝓻𝓸𝓷𝓼 that must satisfy the conflicting optimization targets of "create a simulated world that accurately models external physical reality" and "optimize the simulated world into a desired state". The Gordian knot of computational intractability is transcended by giving up trying to be an interpretible world optimizer as defined by, say, decision theory. All those abstractions that insulate your value system from your world model? You just throw them out. The computationally intractable problem is still computationally intractable. It just stops being a problem for you, because you're not trying to solve that problem anymore.

Answer B: Awakening is not limited to therevada/Samatha. I got there via Zen, for example, which is non-Therevadan. You can even detect Awakening in non-Buddhists when you know what to look for. For example, I believe Mary Baker Eddy ended up at stream entry via Christian prayer.

Is the non-cyclic graph a way of modelling causality as state transitions?

I hope I answered your question. I'm uncertain what you're trying to ask here due to an ambiguity in the word "state". The word "state", can refer to many different things in this context, including altered states of consciousness (as distinct from altered traits), the computational concept of state (vs statelessness), and also attractors (which are similar to altered traits).

Correction: "is that you experienced was real" -> "is that what you experienced was real"

> Now I knew how to not trigger those defense mechanisms.
The linked video looks like rhetorical aikido. If that's what you're talking about, link it. If you meant something else, what did you learn to do?

Typo fixed.


Thank you for adding the link. I think the comments are a good place for it.

This Bene Gesserit stuff is building on top of the stuff I learned in rhetorical aikedo. I got good enough at socratic dialogue that I can put those words on autopilot and focus instead on what my interlocutor's ego is doing.

Then the wave crested.


Is there any more you can say about this? 

People already tell me I have good vibes, and feel like I listen to them[1]. I give off an air of nonchalance, because I think I kill[2] my emotions in public. 

But I do it because it's one more thing to deal with that I generally don't have energy for. I'm already bothered by all the light and sound.

It seems like you're saying "I meditated, and while at first that made sensory issues worse, eventually they just stopped." And I'd like to know why, if that was legible to you.

Would appreciate any advice. I can probably say more about my experiences, but I'm not sure what more, if any, would be helpful.

  1. ^

    I don't know if it's the same as you. I think I'm maybe not as active a listener? I don't think I'm incapable of the way I see you listen in your videos, but I'm not sure I put the energy into it.

  2. ^

    I use a visceral word because I don't approve of this practice in myself. Perhaps "ignore" or "block" would be more accurate?

It seems like you're saying "I meditated, and while at first that made sensory issues worse, eventually they just stopped."

This is accurate, though it must be understood in the appropriate context. I've been meditating for years. Then my sensory issues fixed themselves relatively suddenly, over a period of a few months. This happened after several insight cycles, and well after stream entry.

The way insight cycles work, it's like you used to be a hoarder and you're not anymore because you took to heart Marie Kondo's book. But you live in a house that's full the garbage you used to hoard. You throw out everything in the basement, and discover there's another basement below it that you'd forgotten about years ago and it's full of more garbage. Then you clean up that basement and discover there's another basement below that full of another different kind of garbage. Each process of "clean up a basement; discover another one's below it full of new, exciting garbage to throw away" is an insight cycle. This sensory issue thing was Basement #9. (The number 9 is just a guess. I don't know the exact number of basements I'm at. I've stopped counting.)

All of this garbage in the basement puts a constant low-level stress on you until you clean it up, just like real garbage in a real basement. Cleaning it up Basements #1-#8 gave me the tools and bandwidth[1] to deal with Basement #9. In this way, "dealing with my sensory disorder" constituted an insight cycle.

On Emotions

When you kill an emotion, you suppress it or distract yourself from it. In mystic practice, you listen to it without reinforcing it or getting tangled up in it, and it goes away on its own. Killing an emotion is like using your parasympathetic nervous system to neutralize your sympathetic nervous system. If you are able, it's healthier to let both of them shut off. To do this you need to be in an safe environment.

On Listening

Listening when you're at high samatha (such as after meditation) doesn't take effort. Putting effort into things reads as strain which signals low status.

Advice

Some people do use meditation as a targeted solution to things like chronic pain. I expect this works for some people and doesn't work for others.

For me, I got these effects as a side effect of mystical insight. Is that the right course of action for you? It depends what you want. Mystic insight has lots of different effects you get as a package deal.


  1. Not just mental bandwidth. Physical capital too, like clothes made out of bamboo-rayon. ↩︎

Thank you for the reply. I think I'll need to look into things more.

One clarification I wanted to make. I wouldn't have normally said that I need to put effort into listening. I think I generally feel like it doesn't take effort. But somewhat recently I had an interaction with someone go poorly. It was a date, and they said afterwards that they didn't feel like I wanted to get to know them, because I hadn't asked enough things about them[1]

So I figure there's something lacking in my interaction with people. Something that I'm not doing that I should, and doing things requires effort, so therefore I'm lacking in effort in some way.

I think you're saying in some state it won't be effortful, because it will be the path of least resistance. But I think my problem was not knowing what they wanted, and I don't see how a state of mind would give me that information "for free".

  1. ^

    Possibly this was just idiosyncracy on their part. Other people have not expressed this feeling to me, so I have considered I'm putting too much weight on a single interaction.