Can anyone clear up the following seeming contradiction in Buddhist teachings? On the one hand, there is a lot of talk about the countless lifetimes it takes to arrive at nibbana. This was particularly drilled into us in the Goenka tradition. 1/
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And why is it considered so hard to believe someone who proclaims to be an arhat? OF COURSE there are more charlatans than genuine arhats, but it's not like it's totally wild to imagine that somebody who has been practicing for years and years actually jumped off the wheel.
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Whoa, time to go take a nap after all that heavy Buddhist theorizing!

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Buddhist theorizing and Buddhist philosophy can definitely get pretty tiring haha.
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I had an interesting conversation about these different types of jhanas with Richard Shankman:https://art19.com/shows/buddhist-geeks/episodes/3d9844c4-84db-4dc6-8b5d-611262bfad41 …
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Awesome. I'll give this a listen.
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Leigh Brasington presents an interesting thesis re: concentration jhanas in his recent conversation with
@OortCloudAtlas on@DeconstructingU that seems like it could be applicable here.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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I think it’s simply about how “perfectly” you are practising the four. Doing it perfectly is in some sense synonymous, or just causal of, enlightenment. Anything less than “perfect” takes longer.
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See eg Shinzen Young who often talks about a truly full experience of a single moment being sufficient.
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I don’t see why something similar couldn’t have happened with vipassana, where a one-in-million level vattainment became the standard that almost no one could achieve. The Visuddhimagga is hard core shit and almost all modern Theravada methods claim it as inspiration.
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Leigh basically claims that what constitutes jhana in the suttas is much more achievable than what was later formulated in the Visuddhimagga. His theory is that several centuries of meditating onemanship put the most extreme attainments into the stratosphere.
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It could happen in a moment, Zen style. But it may have (or definitely would have) taken several other moments (or lifetimes) of practice to lead up to that one specific moment of realization.
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