John Wilde:
Notwithstanding all that, people do tend to be wired up similarly, do tend to think and feel similarly, do tend to face similar problems, and are living in the same universe... and so when common problems are overcome -- by whatever means -- there's obviously going to be plenty of overlap in the experience. I'd never try to argue that the type of practice entirely determines the type of result... only that the mode of practice (the aims, the assumptions, the methods, the skills, the choice of what to filter and what to amplify) inevitably conditions the result -- and the way it's talked about.
This is a great topic, thanks you guys for bringing it up.
I find eclecticism interesting in this regard. By gaining personal familiarity with several methods/views and the kinds of temporary and lasting changes they enact, it seems to me that I get a better sense of the commonality or deep structures of transformation that may underly the particular methods and their specific effects. Although I admit this view of mine also includes assumptions. When I was younger, and just had random (although perhaps frequent and intense, relatively speaking) glimpses of various kinds of deeper-seeming truths on the one hand or insights into layers of illusion on the other rather than having a committed practice which had led to significant lasting changes, I conceived an ambition to be a sort of contemplative anthropologist and to implement various diverse systems of method/view to experience and reflect on their different/similar path structures and results. I guess in some ways I have followed a path like that consisting of various paths. And yet there is an internal consistency in retrospect to that eclecticism perhaps due to my most basic motivations for pursuing contemplative development.
For me the emphasis is and has been on being grounded in everyday life and becoming more 'free' in everyday life rather than on cultivating altered states for their own sake. The proof is in the interpersonal and ordinary daily pudding of life ;) A lot of what is different for different cultivators and different paths seems to be the extraordinary content, the special states and stages that arise. If one's basic orientation is to reduce suffering, become free, wake up, or some other articulation of fruition that is explicitly beyond states that arise and pass one is possibly less likely to get caught up in the kinds of changes that result merely from the application of method while holding specific views (?). That seems to be my experience.
Back to the thread of thought in my first paragraph, the thing about the contemplative experiment which is so different from, say, a physics experiment is that in running the experiment (implementing a method, following instructions) you are transforming the laboratory (experience itself and how it functions). So even if a practitioner engages multiple methods in parralel or serially the 'experiment' is not reproducible (for that particular practitioner). Some schools, like the more conservative strains of Tibetan Buddhism, explicitly have students adopt a series of view/practice/lifestyle complexes serially with the assumption that the higher levels deconstruct the false assumptions that are built into the lower levels while building on the experiential realizations that emerge from them. An interesting take on it right? Other more radical schools of Tibetan Buddhism (which are actually older than the more conservative strains) emphasise the 'highest' views and methods from the beginning and then treat the other systems in an entirely pragmatic way on an individual basis as needed, or else implement simpler more nimble methods that are sort of streamlined versions of those 'lower' systems to target specific issues an individual practitioner may be having.
Anyhow, for me, the pragmatic punchline of this line of reflection is that employing a variety of methods and views and tracking the ways they affect my life and ability to be clear, free, open, available, helpful, connected etc (i.e., whatever your goals for cultivation are...) has been a useful way of approaching things. That said, I see a huge difference between a way of applying such an approach that leaves central illusions of a solid seperate self intact vs. a way that shows up such illusions for what they are. And herein is, for me, a way out of the post-modern falacy that all experiences are wholly constructed, and thus infinitely variable. If it doesn't ground back into the interpersonally shared world of other sentient beings and physical, cultural and social realities, in a way the is increasingly obviously effective kind etc from the outside, then that should raise questions IMO.