. Jake .:
Interesting questions-- in some way, it's almost a re-phrasing of the old 'debate' between progressive transformative practice schools (which view awakening as an outcome) and timeless awakening schools (which view it as a natural state like you said).
But I would question some of the assumptions in your post--
1) Who says selfishness is/has been evolutionarily successful? Lots of research is coming out to show that cooperation and pro-social attitudes and behaviors have been key to human success, and maybe mammal success in general.
Hi Jake,
thanks for the interesting answers. I'm not a biologist, but I think that the state of the art of evolutionary psychology still claims that some form of selfishness is still the gold standard of evolutionarily efficient behaviour. The various forms of conditional or calculated cooperation present in nature, especially in highly sociable primates, can be re-read as long-term or indirect selfishness. The type of unconditional, metta-based altruism which – allegedly – awakening produces is a lot more expansive than that.
. Jake .:
2) In the 'mind-healing' hypothesis, why assume that the Natural State was fully instantiated in your younger self and then socialized away? My observations of very young children suggest that a very clear awake state does come over babies and small children from time to time, when their needs have been met and they are feeling open and relaxed, but they also have a full complement of instinctual stuff which requires some form of social learning in order for them to develop the pre-frontal circuitry that allows deffered gratification, taking others' perspectives and other facets of empathy, etc. My own experience suggests there is indeed an awake, free and loving 'nature of mind' but that it has always been perdiodically covered up with mental-emotional activity patterns. Those patterns have changed in the course of development, and in early development, mind was less cluttered and so there were moments when that awake state flashed through quite powerfully. But it took a whole process of normal development and then meditative development to begin to have the capacity for understanding how that all works and to begin to stabilize insight into that natural state.
So, I guess the upshot of my questions is, is mind hacking/mind healing an either-or, or is it a both/and?
I also had thought of the case of young children being perfectly selfish and in a state of enslavement to their own desires as a pretty strong argument in favour of mind-hacking.
I was reluctant to use terms like "natural" or "original" without defining them clearly, knowing full well that a discussion on their meaning could span entire papers, but for the sake of simplicity I decided to use them provisionally in their everyday meaning. Of course I don't think that an 'original' state of mind was instantiated in my brain at any given point, but it seems that there at least some of the non-awakened mind are (undesirable) reactions to the various experiences of socialisation, and can be reversed.