Comments
I'm not particularly knowledgeable about this but my take is:
- Yes enlightenment is real, for some understanding of what "enlightenment" means.
- As I understand, enlightenment doesn't free you from all suffering. Enlightenment is better described as "ego death", where you stop identifying with your experiences. There is a sense in which you still suffer but you don't identify with your suffering.
- Enlightenment is extremely hard to achieve (it requires spending >10% of your waking life meditating for many years) and doesn't appear to make you particularly better at anything. Like if I could become enlightened and then successfully work 80 hours a week because I stop caring about things like motivation and tiredness, that would be great, but I don't think that's possible.
My sense from a very quick skim of the literature is:
It might be possible to do some special pleading around non-dual mindfulness in particular, but frankly, everyone who has their own flavour of mindfulness does a lot of special pleading around it, so I'm default skeptical despite non-dual being my personal preference.
My sense as an experienced non-dual meditator (~10 years, and having experienced 'ego death' before without psychedelics):
I think teaching people mindfulness would be good, but probably no better than teaching them any other kind of therapy. Maybe it's generally more acceptable because it's less stigmatised than self-learning CBT. But I'd be really curious to understand what the people who voted yes were thinking, and in particular what they think 'enlightenment' is.
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028168 ↩︎ ↩︎
https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018 ↩︎ ↩︎
Hey mate! Would you be keen to discuss this over a zoom chat?
With regards to the 3rd point above, most of these studies compare meditation, not enlightenment, to other mental health interventions. Their finding that meditation is no better than CBT is not a negative. Since there is no “one size fit all” psychotherapy, having more options should be a net positive for mental health. Also, if meditation practice can lead to something more, even if that thing is not the end of all suffering, and even if it is rare, that increases the value of meditation practice.
I agree that this finding is not a negative, and that including mindfulness should be a net positive for mental health interventions (especially since it'll adapt well to a lot of cultural contexts). The reason I included this null-ish result was to indicate that Vipassana-style mindfulness is unlikely to produce measurable 'enlightenment' when scaled up as an intervention—otherwise, where is it hiding in these studies? The burden of proof is with mindfulness proponents to find evidence that their method produces the superior effects they claim it does (a) when scaled up and (b) within a time-frame that would make it cost-effective.
(FWIW I think that it probably produces non-inferior effects at scale on comparable timeframes, and for some small number of the population might achieve superiority after some time with the method, but this wouldn't make it a superior candidate for a global health intervention)