Cyberbuddhism

Category: Jargon

  • Mindfulness

    Mindfulness is the maintenance of lucidity prior to awakening.

    The sandbox in your brain induces misperceptions such as craving-aversion and free will. While meditating on a cushion, it is possible to cultivate lucidity, which means that one or more misperceptions is not present.

    Altered states are, by definition, temporary. When a beginning meditator gets off the cushion, the altered state goes away. When the altered state goes away, the lucidity almost1 always goes away too.

    But altered-state-induced lucidity doesn’t go away immediately. Altered states have inertia. It takes time for your brain to reset to its baseline attractor. How long it takes for your brain to revert to misperception depends partially on what is happening in the physical world. A noisy television can shatter your attention immediately, but calm activities like folding laundry can keep the lucidity burning longer. Meditation is like starting a fire, and mindfulness is like keeping that fire going. Generally-speaking, lucidity is usually found in seated meditation. Mindfulness is the process of extending that lucidity beyond the cushion, gently and repeatedly, until eventually lucidity becomes your default state of mind and you have a permanent altered trait.

    Real calmness should be found in activity itself. We say “It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.”

    After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, “Oh, this pace is terrible!” But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog it is very difficult to dry yourself. So there is no need to worry about progress. It is like studying a foreign language; you cannot do it all of a sudden, but by repeating it over and over you will master it.

    ―Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

    1. If the lucity is permanent, then that means an insight cycle has begun. This can happen only once for each kind of lucidity, because that is what “permanent” means. ↩︎
  • Pleasure

    Pleasure

    According to Buddhist dogma, life is suffering. This is counter-intuitive, because some things feel good, right? Doesn’t pleasure feel good?

    Yes. The following are both true:

    1. All fabrications in your umwelt have a positive suffering aspect.
    2. Adding fabrications to your umwelt can decrease your total suffering.

    To understand how this is possible, I am going to use a well-understood example: sound masking.

    Masking

    I used to work in a noisy open office full of people talking. This was kafkaesque because I worked as a computer programmer. I had to focus. People talking and dogs barking—yep, there were untrained dogs that barked at every visitor—interrupted my focus and made it hard to think about the software I was writing.

    To mitigate this problem, I put on music. When I listened to music, the office felt quieter, even though in absolute terms the volume of sound going into my ears had increased. Auditory masking isn’t unusual, and it isn’t limited to music. Adding the sounds of rain falling and fans blowing air can decrease the perceived volume of noise too.

    The brain is a predictive machine. Mild static gets adapted to at the low level, and is predicted away before they hit the cortex. But the static was part of the original signal, and therefore masks some annoying sounds in a bottom-up process.

    Top-down patterns reduce prediction error too. When you know how a song’s going to go, that can get predicted away too at the high level, in a top-down process.

    How does this relate to pleasure? If unpredictable signals are going through your brain, then adding predictable signals can drown out some of the percieved surprise. This is perceived as positive pleasure relative to the reference point.

  • Stream Entry

    Stream Entry

    Stream entry is the completion of your first insight cycle. Your first insight cycle is special because it forever changes the trajectory of your life. Stream entry is like becoming a parent. It fundamentally alters your value system and the constraints you live under.

    The most important thing about stream entry is that it sets off a chain reaction. Prior to your first insight cycle, you can “get off the train”, so-to-speak. Stream entry triggers a cascade of insight cycles. After your first insight cycle, insight cycles will continue for a long time. You can speed it up or slow it down, but there’s no stopping or reversing it. This process takes years, and may end only when you die.

    All insight cycles lower your baseline suffering by repairing disassociation, and stream entry is no exception. Stream entry can have an outsized impact, because stream heals the chronic suffering you perceive first, which tends to be the coarset, most obvious chronic suffering. It’s not unusual for stream entry to reduce your chronic suffering by something on the order of 90%.

    Stream entry is destabilizing too. Insight cycles are often destabilizing, but stream entry can be especially destabilizing because you go into it blind. The first time your basic perceptions about reality are shredded is more shocking than the tenth time.

  • Forgiveness

    Forgiveness

    Clinging to the evil acts people have done is unpleasant. The act does damage once, and then clinging to it continues to hurt you until you forgive the person.

    But what if the person is evil? All the more reason to forgive them. To say “this person is unforgivably evil” is backwards. The only reason to forgive someone is for being evil. After all, there is no need to forgive someone for being good.

    Forgiving does not equal forgetting. When a person does bad things, it is useful data. Useful data should be preserved. Forgiveness isn’t about consequentialism or justice. Those are extrinsic processes. Forgiveness is an intrinsic process. Forgiveness is simply letting go of grievance and accepting that people are what they are.

    What if a person’s acts are atrocious? Bad people are like crocodiles. Crocodiles are dangerous. It is a wild crocodiles’s nature to eat people. Pretending a crocodile is safe just puts people in unnecessary danger, which is bad. Forgetting that crocodiles are dangerous puts people in danger too. You shouldn’t allow a crocodile into your bedroom.

    Notice that forgiveness doesn’t have anything to do with strategic decisions. Forgiveness does not mean treating dishonest people as if they are honest, or treating violent people as if they are gentle. External actions are useful to the extent that they facilitate this internal process. It is difficult to forgive someone in your heart while you are screaming at him or her.

    Accepting that crocodiles are crocodiles does not put anyone in danger. It’s just a form of accurately modeling reality, which protects people from physical danger.

    Meanwhile, the crocodile you observe is a crocodile in your umwelt. When you resent it, you are resenting a part of your own umwelt, which drives disassociation and traps you in samsara.

  • Morality

    Morality

    Is morality objective or subjective? This is a question I like to ask when teaching philosophy. It is a zugzwang gambit. Both answers are traps.

    “Morality is objective”, answers the student.

    “If morality is objective then it must be measurable. How do you create a scientific experiment to measure morality?” I ask.

    “That is obviously impossible,” says the student, “Therefore morality is not objective. Since morality is not objective, morality must be subjective.”

    “Morality is subjective,” answers the student.

    “If morality is subjective, then does that mean there are no objective grounds with which to condemn evil?” I ask.

    “Of course not,” says the student, “Moral relativism does not exonerate evildoers. Since morality cannot be arbitrary, morality must be objective.”

    Politics is dominated by calls to “Crush <outgroup>!”, social conformity, and moral relativism. When you encounter those rare people with ethical sense, they tend to advocate an orthogonal compass.

    Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who persecute you.

    ―Jesus

    In Cyberbuddhism, the morality of conduct is defined by its intrinsic effect on your disassociation.

    • Moral conduct is thought and behavior that decreases your disassociation.
    • Immoral conduct is thought and behavior that increases your disassocation.

    Universal love is moral because it directly attacks dualism. Unconditional forgiveness is moral because it is incompatible with clinging. Speaking truthfully prevents doublethink. Mistreating other people for your own self-advancement is immoral because it it fuels disassociation.