Hi Alan
I hope you're not too disappointed after I recommended it to strongly.
Alan Smithee:
I read the chapter "What Enlightenment Is and How to Attain It" and it wasn't very good. He claims to be speaking about his experiences of enlightenment which resulted from his Vipassana meditation, but, counter to the tenets of hardcore dharma, he doesn't actually use any of the technical terms, discuss his own experiences, etc., so that, for instance, when he talks about his "four milestones of meditation," I have no idea whether he is talking about four "coded" milestones within 1st Path [for instance, perhaps something like A+P, Dark Night, Equanimity, and then Path] or whether he is talking about 1st Path, then 2nd, then 3rd, and then 4th.
The four milestones is a map, similar to the "simple model" in MCTB, so it parallels the Theravada 4-path model, not the ñanas of a single path.
One of the things I really liked about this book was in fact that it didn't rely on Buddhist technical terms but uses "ordinary" words. When I found MCTB, I was instantly, totally hooked - the detail, the technical, precise language... at one point, later on, I began to appreciate that it's possible to talk about subtle insights in unsubtle, more general terms.
The whole article suffers from this resistance to being specific or technical. He also doesn't talk AT ALL about any of his own experiences with meditation, meaning, he doesn't give any personal accounts, which were what I was hoping to read - a discussion of how he got enlightened and what he saw and learned before/during/after the process.
Yeah, he did that, too, in the "Baptists Head" books and website. Some samples:
Metta Bhavana on a retreat.
I Was Molested by a Phantom NunStream-entry:
Honeymoon With An AngelFor someone who was supposedly really influenced by Dan and his pragmatic approach, he really didn't seem to learn anything from him, as this article is the kind of bland, mushy philosophizing which gets critiqued all the time on this message board. As a work which purports to be about "Truth" in a postmodern/relativist age, believe me, this is the height of sophistry.
If he weren't such a hardcore meditator and practitioner of Magick, I'd agree. There are many ways to write about this: Daniel's is hyper-analytic, geeky, and technical; Jack Kornfield is all about heart stuff; Duncan is philosophical. They all have the diamond core underneath all the sugary frosting. (and yes, the über-technical geek-mode stuff in MCTB is candy bait designed to motivate geeks to actually practice this stuff instead of reading and writing about it

)
But all people don't have to be into the same books.
Cheers,
Florian