I had a Kensho experience happen to me, which I believe is the same as stream entry, the first of the 4 stages of enlightenment (according to the oldest model, the Therevadan “4 Path Model”. Check out Daniel Ingram’s “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha” for more info)
Stream entry reduced suffering by ~90% (rough guess), it’s mad
There’s been a recent trend in tpot of people moving more in this direction (rather than e.g. meditating in order to calm the mind)
What is enlightenment?
Daniel Ingram uses the therevadan 4 path model in his book “mastering the core teachings of the buddha”
1st path → you drop the first 3 fetters. Stream entry, Kensho
2nd path → you weaken fetters 4 and 5
3rd path → you drop fetters 4 and 5
4th path (full enlightenment, arahantship) → you drop the rest of the fetters
See the chapter in his book for more info
People aiming at enlightenment
Blog post →Zen and the art of speedrunning enlightenment → in this blog post he talks about how enlightenment was actually lost for hundreds of years, because of a mis-understanding where buddhists believes you had to sharpen your concentration (shamatha) before you could do insight (vipassana) practice, which is what leads to enlightenment. And then someone realised, hang on, you can actually just do vipassana (e.g. body scanning), because that sharpens your concentration (shamatha) anyway. D’oh
He also makes the point that if the Buddha was alive now, he’d be doing all kinds of wacky shit, psychedelics, brain imaging devices, who knows. He wouldn’t be following dogma like a lil dweeb
Also this reminds me of the thing where the Buddha’s teachings (Therevada buddhism, the oldest) are seen as less “complete”/good/efficient by future schools (Mahayana and Vajryana). So Buddhism does have some cool like “ok the OG was a cool guy but we’ve innovated on him” stuff built in
Fetters people
So, as above, each stage involves dropping (or weakening) fetters
So, in the last ~1 year, a few coaches have popped up who help you directly drop the fetters
I’ve heard is described that old-school meditation, like e.g. Zen or Therevada, is like being in a pitch-black cave, and the teacher is like “if you meditate for 10,000 hours, you’ll eventually stumble across the light switch”.
Whereas you can do direct “pointing” practice, where a teacher is like “here it is, here’s the light switch, here here here”, making it much easier for you to “stumble” across it
So that’s what these fetters guys do → they have exercises for each fetter, things to notice in your experience, where you realise that you’ve actually been operating from false beliefs (that is, Ignorance, one of the 3 key defilements (again, see Daniel Ingram’s book))
Brent Baumgartner → I worked for Brent for a year! I love Brent. He’s pivoted into fetters stuff recently (along with other stuff like Aletheia), which is super super super exciting
This involves training your brain to be able to see the “arising and passing away” of all phenomena. Basically, if you body scan for hundreds (or thousands?) of hours, you will get a much higher resolution view of your world model that you’re creating, and you’ll see how everything is impermanent sensations that arise and pass away constantly, and if you look at this for long enough, you’ll have a click and boom, partial enlightenment. Then you repeat this process for the 4 paths
You get to the stage called “deep insight into the arising of passing of all phenomena” (AKA “deep insight”), and then you keep meditating until a click happens.
Bill Plotkin (author of “Saints and Psychopaths, a very good short book about enlightenment, just read part 2 (Saints)) says that with very good technique, you should be able to get to Deep Insight on a 10-day retreat