Dhamma diagnosis is more like something that you do, and part of the whole process.

You have experiences and you compare your experiences to your previous experiences and what other people say about their experiences.
Both are not very very useful (memory changes what really happened) and words are not good to describe experiences.

But it's natural, it happens, you have a wow experience or you think that your baseline shifted and you naturally think, "what was that?", "will it last?"

When you say "what matters is causes and conditions", well, evaluation (private or public) of one's experiences is another thing subject to that.

You think you attained something, you think it is important, people (or a teacher) say that you did, etc.
It's all a part of the causal network, but that doesn't make it less important.

If you're being hammered by a Dark Night, or doubting your accomplishments, or feeling great and refreshed after a shift or a very good concentration session, it matters to you.

Also, identification happens, you can't fight it by denying it, the very act of denying is another identification.
Interpretation, thoughts and views will not help much to get insight.

All you can do, is feel it's qualities (you know, the 3Cs), again and again, fast, wide, slow and narrow.

The mind will compare your experiences no matter what, if you are in the Dark Night and you don't use maps, you will compare it to when you were feeling better in the past (and probably make very bad decisions).

That said, I do agree that obsessing with maps is probably not useful, but denying them is also not that useful.

In meditation (and in most things in life) it's the people themselves who have to find the usefulness and limits of the tools they use to improve their life.

Given your caveat, Daniel Jones, why even weigh in here and with this topic? I'm really curious about your intent.

aloha daniel,

   I agree about the obsession with maps being counter-productive in overcoming ego. A "map is not the territory" has become a truism, so of course it is wrong. Lewis carroll once wrote (in "sylvie and bruno concluded") about a map with a "scale of a mile to a mile." One character noted there were difficulties in using the map and said, "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well." (Luis borges wrote a little story based on this idea.)

   There is, presumably, a "territory" (ding an sich, if you philosophize), but what we think we know is more of a map. We see what we believe is out there based on sensual clues and (mostly) context. The more context, the fewer the clues we use to fill in the map we use to "navigate" the world. So-called "experience" provides context. The more experienced a person is, the less they actually encounter the world in all its randomity, vigor, and beauty. Children and "empty" adepts experience the freshness and vitality of life.

   There is also a lot of talk about the commentary that goes on in people's heads, the "inner dialogue" which seems to overlay experience with anything from sober and considered commentary to utter babble; more or less. If what we see and hear and believe is "real" is actually just a map, then all this inner commentary is a secondary sort of map, at one remove from actual "experience." The kazoo playing over the orchestra. Then we have the comments of others, some wise perhaps but most not, as a tertiary source of mapping. By this time we have gotten to a pretty attenuated version of "reality." Tatters of old maps crop up here and there in the deserts, as in borge's story.

   Plato noticed that we see circles, horses, people, but the ones we actually see with our senses are not perfect circles, perfect horses or perfect people, they deviate from perfection in countless small ways. He concluded that the idea of perfection is more real than the experiences of things that are more or less conformable to the idea.

   I think in actual fact there is constant feedback between novelty (randomity) and context (pattern; plato's "idea"). What conforms to pattern is seen as right, good, beautiful, just. The Pattern, what is good, beautiful, just and true, evolves intuitively in accordance with encounters with randomity. We interfere with this natural process when we try to take directions instead of trustingour own reason and intuition. Logic tells us that what has happened will happen again (pattern). Intuition sees everything new (random). We have two hemispheres, and the logical left distinguishes "symbol" from "reality." The intuitive right half probably cannot distinguish symbol from reality, dreaming and hallucinating its reality. We use these two halves of the brain to provide parallax, as the eyes do; a sense of depth.

   This said, you go straight from decrying an obsession with maps to denying that anyone's dhamma diagnosis matters. I can't go that far. What about the zen mondos, the q & a that so often leads to sudden, overpowering insight? 

   The delusion that our thinking is strictly our own has to do with accepting the subjectivity of the ego, which the buddha tells us is false, there being no self-nature in nature. We can only think in terms of dialogue, anything else is babble; as wittengenstein points out, "there is no private language." The hindus have the image of the lotus blossom, which floats on the surface of the pond, but rises and falls with that surface, never losing touch with the supporting water. So we interface our own map with other's maps, while language itself provides a metamap coincident with the territory of conscious human experience. We can only rise as high as our (human) imagination can go. It doesn't matter what we may imagine another knows, if we don't know it ourselves. There was once a half-wise fish, who approached a wise fish and asked, "please sir, can you tell me where the ocean is?" The wise fish replied, "The ocean is all around you." The half-wise fish, disappointed, swam off saying, "but this is just water."

   If we try to adapt the map of another to our own needs we will be confused. We will translate their map points into our own, simply to try to make sense of it. Our skills at discerning patterns will overlay one set of patterns on another, causing dissonance. If we are not true to our own experience, we will lose any real sense of who we are. I suspect this is the cause of dark nights and letdowns. When one's map (lright brain) and one's territory (left brain) don't coincide, we feel distress and have difficulty coping. This is often caused by accepting uncritically what people say and trying to believe in contradictory things. No one can walk the path for us. We have to be path-oriented and not goal-oriented.

   Now, perhaps I diagnose a dhamma "problem" as one of attachment to maps? Is this not what we are doing? We're not saying my map is better than your map, and that you should use mine. Yet there is guidance, in the form of "throw away your map." 

   As for "the measure of change" being pragmatism, that's just another map. Or a clock. Maybe, as nietzsche says, you gradually come to feeling that all experiences are ones you will be willing to repeat endlessly, as "eternal recurrence." Maybe the endless sequence of human lives is our "eternal recurrence."

terry


from gregory bateson, "mind and nature":



2. THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY, AND THE NAME IS NOT THE THING NAMED

   This principle, made famous by Alfred Korzybski, strikes at many levels. It reminds us in a general way that when we  think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain. But in a abstract way, Korzybski's statement asserts that in all thought or percep­tion or communication about perception, there is a transformation, coding, between the report and the thing reported, the Ding an sich. Above all, the relation between the report and that mysterious thing reported tends to have the nature of a classification, an assignment of the thing to a class. Naming is always classifying, and mapping is essentially the same as naming.

   Korzybski was, on the whole, speaking as a philosopher, attempting to persuade people to discipline their manner of thinking. But he could not win. When we come to apply his dictum to the natural history of human mental process, the matter is not quite so simple. The distinction between the name and the thing named or the map and territory is perhaps really made only by the dominant hemisphere of the brain. The symbolic and affective hemisphere, normally on the right-hand side is probably unable to distinguish name from thing named. It therefore happens that certain nonrational types of behavior are necessarily present in human life. We do, in fact, have two hemispheres; and we cannot get away from that fact. Each hemisphere does, in fact, operate somewhat differently from the other, and we cannot get away from the tangles that that difference proposes.

   For example, with the dominant hemisphere, we can regard such a thing as a flag as a sort of name of the country or organization that it represents. But the right hemisphere does not draw this distinction and regards the flag as sacramentally identical with what it represents. So "Old Glory" is the United States . If somebody steps on it, the response may be rage. And this rage will not be diminished by an explanation of map-territory relations. (After all, the man who tramples the flag is equally identifying it with that for which it stands.) There will always and necessarily be a large number of situations in which the response is not guided by the logical distinction between the name and the thing named .

Your training as a surgeon doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you manage to save lives and don’t kill too many trying. 

The usefulness for me as an individual practicioner:
The maps help me navigate. I know what to look for and know when I need to secondguess myself and what challenges to take on. They make the darknight predictable and managable. Recognizing the nana and naming it takes away so much of its power. Also, I can be mentally prepared for the next challenge. I can see why it might be problematic for many people, but I’m the nerdy type. The maps gave me detailed knowledge of the terrain. I’m not interested in comparing myself to others. I just want to know what I’m doing so that I can avoid the traps. The maps have successfully helped me with that so far. Also, they inspire me. I enjoy getting to the bottom with the technical details just for the fun of it.

The usefulness with regard to teaching:
Sure, people can be asshats even with attainments in their baggage, but I’m pretty good at recognizing asshats, and they tend to avoid me. That leaves me with the risk of bumping in to teachers that are nice people who mean well but don’t know what they are doing and thus could mess me up. I wouldn’t want that. If I were the teacher, I would want to be sure that I had enough insights to avoid messing up my students. Anything else would be unethical.

There are many different ways of growing as a person. Why not combine them to the best of one’s ability? Being a compassionate human being is a great goal and certainly a goal of mine. I think it is more likely that I succeed if I can also avoid unnecessary suffering and not least understand the mechanisms of suffering to the benefit of all sentient beings. Getting insights is not a guarantee, but it certainly doesn’t get in the way.

If you don’t find the maps useful, then don’t use them. As simple as that.

Hi Daniel,

IMO insight maps don't need to be in conflict with a fetters model. The insight maps are just one attempt at a more granular map of the territory in between the fetters milestones.