T DC:
...To come to my main point: in my experience, an attainment of final peace, a freedom from self-referential thought and painful emotion, a state of ultimate acomplishment is possible. Such an acomplishment lies at the end of a long path, far beyond the attainment of full enlightenment itself, which in turn lies far beyond the attainment of 4th path.
Really good post. I think it cuts to the heart of the desire to make some order out of the chaos and help people make progress. It will be interesting to see how the conversation goes.
I think in your quote above, you say "experience" but I think you mean "opinion", right? Or are you at the end of a long path, far beyond the attainment of full enlightenment itself? It's important to be clear about how much you have directly experienced and how much is inferences from reading, talking with others, analysis, etc. That's really at the heart of things.
I would say the early days of DhO were as chaotic as now. Probably the only distinction was there was more of a "backlog" of frustrated yogis that had searched for some way to make sense of practice and events that they had experienced. Everyone had a dedicated daily practice and would pretty much honor the idea of being clear about what they had experienced vs. what they were trying to understand. So conversations were a little be more about practice and a little bit less about models. Basically, it was more about trying to understand the degree to which models could be reconciled with the realities of practice, rather than the other way around.
The most important thing is that people don't give away their personal intelligence and power of practice over to someone else or their model. What happens in meditation >is< what is happening in meditation. Each of us have the truth of our experience, the results of thier practice method, and each of us have to be honest about what seems to work and what doesn't. There really isn't a perfect map or a perfect method, it has to be worked out individually. No one can teach or direct someone into enlightment. It's basically a lot of personal investigation of the mind on the cushion. Is there tension/suffering/ill-will? What causes it? What reduces it?
If you read the biographies of past masters, you will find that each of them advocated different practices, used different language, taught their students differently, and were regarded differently by their peers/culture. Their path and results are uniquely theirs, no two masters are the same. So while the four path model generally can act as an umbrella for their path and results, when it comes to the details, the model is basically just a sketch.
Forums like this allow people to see more of the confusing events of people's practice. My guess is that if we sat with masters of old, we would find all of these same confusing events -- discussions about maps, about proper practice, about results, about proper behavior and cultural roles after obtaining results. What would it have been like when Buddha was trying to grow a community of practioners and had to establish lots of little rules to keep people practicing? It would probably be a lot like a messy internet forum.
Ultimately, meditation solves our own problem, the problem that lies right in the heart of our discontent. It doesn't do that by fitting our experience to a model or by giving us something called an attainment or path or enlightenment. It does it by going to the essence of discontent, which goes beyond any particular experience. When we see how the habit of discontenment can't be solved by any experience, but rather by seeing it as a habit that seems to be "I" -- then we see how all the attempts to systematize and organize chaos into order has been a source of our discontent since the beginning of this "I".
The main thing is to follow one's own path, really deal with the actual problems along the way, and don't abstract things to a point where the gritty reality is overlooked. Awakening is possible, but it means becoming intimate with every experience that seems like a problem in our own mind.
(Hmm... that was kinda rant-y. Oh well, hope it helps in some way!)