I transcribed a couple of questions whose phenomenological answers seemed very interesting for practice. If any fellow member finds an error in the transcription, please let me know. At 35:49 there are some words I couldn't understand.
MaxAnte: What are some of the actual, real world, tangible benefits of full Enlightenment?
Daniel Ingram: This kind of painful process that was literally sort like a ‘low grade headache’ (best way to explain it) stopped. That was just delightful, and in its place there’s a sense of synchrony. Synchrony just feels really nice. Everything synchronizes with itself. Before, everything feels out of phase. There is this that and then my knowing of it. There where this that and then this, and I was here and I was there. There was this always sense of jarring out-of-phaseness, which somehow experientially is just unpleasant. It’s suffering. It’s a fundamental type of suffering.
And when that stopped, the sense of synchrony and naturalness is substantially more delightful, just experientially. And that keeps on being substantially more delightful, moment after moment. It’s like a pleasure you don’t get a tolerance to. It’s a niceness that every moment is just as nice as the moment before, in that specific way.
That doesn’t mean that things can’t be unpleasant, but that quality is also there, even in very unpleasant things. So I’m not meaning to say there’s not the perception of pain or that everything is always nice. It isn’t. There’s still pain, but that quality of synchrony is simply delightful and is always happening. Actually, I’ve come to appreciate it more as time has gone on it. Continues to sort of be like ‘yeah’, almost like there’s like … as it sort of cascades through all other aspects of mind and situations and conditioning.
It’s fascinating to see some memory –I may not have had in 20 years– come up, and now it arises in this totally different space, where identity is nothing like the solid sticky thing it was before. And now it’s just a thought and space. That rewires something in the brain that now that memory –which might have been painful or complicated– is now arising in a space that is so much more clear and open. And in which thought, rather than being contracted into, is literally just this super wispy thing in this big echoey room that is so much nicer … Also, there will be meetings and I’m looking around like I’m the only person in the room full-time. If you’re the person who’s really in the room and everybody else isn’t in the meeting, that’s a real advantage!
MaxAnte: So, you think there are some actually real-world advantages here that you’re experiencing ongoingly?
Daniel Ingram: Sure, because people are constantly like “oh, I wasn’t really present for that … I wasn’t really into that”. Well, now the cool thing about being awake is that the holodeck no longer being filtered through the serial line that was constantly getting interrupted, and turning to the imagined holodeck –there was another holodeck– would tuned out the sort of consensus holodeck when it’s tuned to its internal holodeck … well, that’s not happening in that way. The default is now the consensus holodeck (as much as anything can be a consensus when we all have our own advantage points).
Speaking in relative terms, but ignoring all the ontological problems –I don’t want to go into that–, basically the room and being in the room (or the space or the field or wherever you are) is the default. Whereas before, tuning out was the default. Being lost in thought was the default. The default mode network being activated to-not-really-be-here was the default. Now the natural default is to be here. And by the way, if I really need to, I can check my calendar and perform a cognitive task that for some reason like to do that high level function I really kind of need to tune out the room a little bit, that can happen. But then the room is back as soon as that stops. Whereas before, it was the other way around. This is substantially better.
The other thing is the proportionality, which is a hard thing to explain. 99% of this room –even if I’m in pain somewhere– has no pain. And this is the vast experience, so the whole room is the experience evenly in some kind of way. Let’s say I have a pain in my knee: it’s no bigger than it is. In comparison to the volume of the space, it’s still really small. And the mind is also not doing that contracted exaggerating thing it used to do, where it would take the pain or make this big thing out of it and ignore all the areas that were neutral or even pleasant, that it becomes the sort of fixation. Whereas (now) even when I have pain in one place, most other places are neutral and or might even feel nice.
And so, also things that feel nice are much easier to perceive as I’m here. You can’t see me now because this is an audio, but I’m moving my hands around and like the coolness of the air on my fingers, it’s delightful. There’s something about the echo in the room that sounds kind of cool, like even that little click of your fingers, like it has a sort of nice little snap to it. There’s the glistening of the light on your hair, which is just naturally kind of cool when it’s just allowed to be itself, and that sort of childlike wondrous way of people perceiving things when they’re just in it, like you’re watching a beautiful sunset, you forget about the day and you’re just in the beautiful colors …
Well, everything has something of that to it in some way, because there’s the immediate sensate experience and it’s wrought on rock (35:49?) because we get everything kind of processed, but as raw as you can get with the human brain that receives everything kind of processed, and so there’s something really nice about that. The proportionality of though also. So emotions are mostly thoughts and then you get contracted into the thought rather than having it just be this wispy thing in space. And then because when you contract into the thought it then becomes a huge part of your world and then that distorts how much of a reaction you have to it. And then that costs a much greater release of all the stress chemicals if you’re having some unpleasant thought, because the brain is now taking that as a total world or whatever you get lost in the anger or whatever and then that creates a whole much bigger stress response and all these chemicals.
Well now it’s not that they aren’t stressors and things, but the thought arises in the room, is proportional, and in terms of experience the thoughts are really small wispy things most of the time. And then the stress chemicals that result from that, even if it’s really unpleasant thought, are vastly less because the experience of it wasn’t contracted into and the brain didn’t freak out that now this is a total world cut off from most of the room, which again is fine, and in fact pretty nice. So, it’s not that it made all bad emotions go away, but the relationship to it and the physiology of it is really different.
And the envelope of these things thus is a lot different, meaning the sort of attack, sustain and decay –the music synthesizer terms in terms of sound–. The attack is really fast because things are clear, but the release is also really fast because the thought arises and then it disappears. And the maybe some little stress chemical arises and then those bodily sensations hang out for a little bit, and then they disappear. But there’s nothing like the sort of feedback loop in the way that it used to be before, where this hurts and this cost of the thought and this thing and then that causes stress chemicals and they would loop and loop and loop… and this really exaggerated distorted way long after the thing had happened. And you’re just sitting there most of the room is fine, like why is the brain doing that? It’s just torturing itself, it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t benefit from that. And so the default now is to not do that, whereas before the default was to do that. So it’s not like some small sort of short versions of that can’t happen in extreme circumstances, but it’s vastly shorter and it’s vastly milder. So that’s better.
All of those things have been substantial upgrades … like unbelievable upgrades. Like I would give it all the stuff I lost getting this, I would give that again and more … many more times, to get this. This is such a benefit in terms of the actual living feel of it. I can’t even tell you.
Does it perform exactly like the old text said it would? No. Does it beat the crap out of what I had before? Absolutely yes. And the cool thing is this is reproducible and it’s based on really straight forward assumptions, just sensate clarity about intentions, mental impressions, thoughts in the room, experience, spotty mind, Six Sense Doors, and just noticing that clearly. That’s really straight forward and portable. And so that’s one of the supercool things about it. And it actually is reproducible. So people were able to do this, they were able to tell me how to do it and it’s like ‘yeah!’ so I like that. It satisfies the empiricist in me. It’s very egalitarian. Like here you are, here’s your senses, perceive them clearly. This can be yours.
