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I think about this a lot with regards to meditation and therapy and mental health and such. What if most decent meditators are way past where the Buddha & co ever reached Dharma today is obsessed with what people a thousand years ago experienced, but maybe we shouldn’t be

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@historyinmemes

100 years different in athletic ability

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By decent meditators I still mean above ten thousand hours of practice. But that’s still a huge amount of people

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Although, also this. Dude made one of the most surprising and actionable scientific discoveries in history — dukkha exists and tanha is its cause, which you can learn to stop doing — and practically no one has heard of it and society didn’t update at all

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Replying to @JakeOrthwein and @nickcammarata

It is so wild to me that some dude figured out “the end of suffering” and we didn’t then spontaneously reorder all of society around it

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The dharma world is probably too focused on the Buddha and old scholars, and 99.9% of the world is way under focused on them and would benefit tremendously from learning what they are talking about and discovered — and which has been successfully replicated for a thousand+ years

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They weren’t saying mushy things about how we’re all one, they were making a huge amount of hard-to-vary precise theories about psychology and qualia and how suffering and tension works, predictions that have been replicated more than practically anything else in science

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Also “how to be happy” which modern society and science thinks is a giant mystery, was solved a long time ago in extreme detail with explanations of happiness (lack of dukkha), causal mechanics of how it works, experiments to increase it, and tens of thousands of replications

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“Dharma is more replicable than ~all of modern psychology” has to become a meme

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All these people, who all did basically the same thing, across virtually every culture on Earth over centuries all being like yup it worked this makes sense, and then meanwhile science is like maybe one day we’ll discover the answer to this giant mystery??

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In fact I’ve never seen writing of any kind that’s like “I spent a ton of time with a concentrated attention and looked and there wasn’t dukkha” or “I saw dukkha but tanha wasn’t it’s cause” or anything like this. Everyone that looks finds out the same thing

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ehh i mean idk the finer points of this stuff but the impression i got was that everyone who looks does *not* find the same thing, when i interviewed a bunch of ppl who considered themselves to have gained special insight, some teachers

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like i'd often have the experience of listening to someone talk, and agreeing with them deeply, like wow, we have found the same thing, yes, exactly that, and that, and that, and... wait, what the fuck? they'd say something *totally* 'missing it' in my view

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but like, could never predict how they missed it, or in what direction. sometimes they wouldnt have insights that i'd thought were self-evident or prerequisites to other ones they had, or came to *entirely* different conclusions based off a really solid set of core insights

8:38 AM · Aug 12, 2022

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Michael Taft (simulation)

@OortCloudAtlas

It’s interesting, potentially confusing, and deeply instructive that any good teacher eventually ends up teaching their own version of the dharma.

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I think there’s a big difference between teaching general relativity in different ways using slightly different thought experiments, and teaching different theories of gravity. My assumption is dharma tends to be #1 but if it’s #2 there’s a big problem

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ah, that’s fair, it’s possible 1. I’m referring to a small set of core things that do replicate, and in practice people have weird metaphysical beliefs and such, just not the ppl I know 2. Even the small set of things I’m referring to (eg dependent origination) don’t replicate

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If 2 is true I’d update a lot I think. You’ve already convinced me at least 1 is true, and that it’s reasonable for people to be skeptical if their exposure to this is people with tons of weird beliefs rather than a small set of mechanistic claims (which is how I view it)

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Do you have any specific examples or would that be breaking privacy?

phaent is in Austin

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Also, using your own judgment as the meter stick of whether someone else's views are predictable seems a bit contrived.