Paths Up the Mountain

 In his TED talk, Shi Heng Yi tells the story of a man who wants to climb to the top of the mountain. In preparation, he asks travellers at the base which path they took and what they saw at the top. On learning of each path, the man finds some reason why that particular path might not work for him. Ultimately, he decides having heard all of their stories that he no longer needs to make the climb himself as he already knows what he'll find there.

In this parable, I see quite a few warnings to myself personally. I, too, often find it easier to survey the many approaches to an endeavour (particularly one as daunting as looking for enlightenment) than to actually undertake the arduous journey that might lead me to achieving it. Also, I often satisfy myself that by reading about the experiences of others I have a pretty good idea of what the end goal is and thus have not lost much in not jumping in.

It might be nice then, if we are to pursue this journey of self-improvement, to pick a path and jump in. Of course, this blog and the other are a step towards that, but I wonder if we might not also dive deeply into one of the existing approaches towards enlightenment and see what we might find walking that path ourselves. What do you think? Is there a particular path that you'd like us to start on and share stories along?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pilgrim

 Your post is so rich - I'm not sure where to start. Perhaps first to say that yes, let us discuss offline a quotidian address 2.0. :) Your distinction between true progress and experienced progress is an interesting one, and one that rings true to me. If we are progressing, but lack the contextual supports to make us feel we are, is our solution in part a change in mindset? A different way of seeing our lives and world, a new way of counting those markers? I have been reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which I find esoteric in the literal sense: I can't read it intensively, rather I scatter my attention across the page and see what leaps out at me. I suspect I could read it again and notice totally different things. It is a mix of philosophy, religion, Freudian psychoanalysis, and storytelling. Still, it has led me to reflect on enlightenment - what is it? It seems to me a common thread across many conceptions is that the enlightened realize that mos...
Read more

Cultivation

 I have no definition of enlightenment. As I gestured at in my last post, I think it has something to do with realizing what matters and what doesn't matter; and that a vast amount on which we spend time in our lives doesn't matter. Realizing it not just in the sense of being able to say it, but to truly feel it. Your point about a deeper connection to the world seems important too: that is something that does matter, I think.  On the other hand, the link to physical exercise troubles me. It's certainly possible that's enlightenment, but if it is simply exhaustion making you care less about things, then to my mind it is not. Enlightenment, I think, isn't just about not caring about what doesn't matter (which, temporarily, could result from exhaustion) but also caring deeply about what does. Let me try another angle. I tend to believe that competition is fundamentally important to self-improvement. When done well, it can push us to be better, to improve, whether ...
Read more

Rara Avis

How can we know if we're ready for black swans, and change course if we're not? Great question. I like to reason about collective human systems (societies, organizations, etc) using the same set of tools I would for studying a machine learning systems. Partly, this is because when you've got a nice new hammer, everything takes on a distinctively nailish aspect. However, it also seems that despite humans being agents exercising individual autonomy, collections of humans are awfully good at climbing uphill relative to metrics you can get them to agree to care about. We are all living longer, children are dying less frequently, and we are on average more wealthy. Also like a machine learning model, we often improve these metrics to the detriment of things outside of our collectively agreed upon reward function (externalities) and we don't distribute the average across all people, but that is a discussion for another time. So, I guess my first answer to your question ab...
Read more