I have been wondering recently whether vipassana counts as a form of hacking (tinkering with the functionality of a complex system until it does something useful, which however it was not intended to do) or rather as retuning the mind to an original, desirable, "natural" state which was part of its design but was somehow lost (socialisation? modern society? the abandonment of hunter-gatherer society? coming down from the trees?). Good arguments could be made for each of the two options.

For the mind-hacking hypothesis one could argue that the palette of emotions and behaviours of the pre-vipassana mind more clearly hews to models of behaviour which are evolutionarily efficient (selfishness, materialism, competitive behaviour) and should therefore be default. Moreover, once awakened the mind finds solace and happiness in characteristics that makes it evolutionarily unfit. How could this be part of its design?

For the mind-healing hypothesis (which I used to disfavour but is now slowly gaining my favour) I could say that (subjectively speaking) the more I advance the more some of my most 'skilful' perceptive states resemble those of a much younger version of myself, which seem to suggest that the intervening process of socialisation brought me astray from that initial state. Additionally, I can identify the period of my life in which I 'learnt' some of the unskillful stuff that I find myself doing and thinking and the reasons and influences which generated and strengthened those behaviours.
Lastly, the mental qualities of the awakened mind are described as being more evolutionarily inefficient (in terms of selfish, material aggrandizement) but also as pleasant, and suffering is (I believe) in most medical and psychiatric textbooks the ultimate hallmark to define disease.

Any thoughts?

It seems pretty clear to me that it's closer to mental hacking. I mean, babies could hardly be described as serene, and apes even less so - we're not descended from fallen gods, there's no evidence of a sinless ancestry. Even though there is a child-like fearlessness and lack of neurotic crap to deal with, that's about as far as it goes.

I'd say a more accurate description would be mind debugging - it's essentially about removing the distortions in our perception of reality, not adding new, more pleasant ones.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/freedomfrombuddhanature.html

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 succesful? 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. Anyhow, just looking around at what makes the (human) world actually work puts the lie to the notion of hyperindividualist, selfish evolution I think. Also, since you mention socialization, don't forget the world that many of the early evolutionary thinkers were socialized into... in Darwin's age, selfishness etc. were being looked at as 'the natural state'. Malthus inspired Darwin with his thinking-- which makes the term 'social Darwinism' kind of silly, since Darwin was really making a kind of biological Malthusianism. In other words, all that 'evolution favors selfishness' meme is coming from a period in history and a class in society that was very happy to think that way to justify their own privilege.

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?

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.




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.

Wow, this guy really is a great scholar!

yes, very very good article.

I'm a bit of a Taan Geoff fanboy.

Probably about 40% of everything he writes is, "You're doing it wrong," which just makes intuitive sense to me, since most people do most things the wrong way. But he's both very scholarly and very grounded in the practice, which makes him hard if not impossible to ignore if you're interested in Theravada.