Muddy

I think most people in the west dramatically underestimate the depth of freedom that the Buddhist project is aimed towards. Most westerners treat the goal of Buddhism as something like gaining maximal freedom to pursue their genetically and culturally pre-programmed goals. They take it as a given that the point of life is basically to gain meaning from exciting and pleasurable experiences, having good sex, building a family, having a stimulating career etc, and feeling a maximal baseline happiness whilst you do so. They then view Buddhist practice as ultimately geared towards a combination of reducing friction towards getting those goals and maximizing their happiness baseline whilst they do so. This, actually, I think is a wonderful and worthwhile goal. Buddhist practices absolutely *can* give us this type of freedom. They can make us both more effective at achieving these goals, dramatically increase our happiness baseline whilst we do so and ensure we are more compassionate to others along the way. This is a genuinely worthy goal to attain. But it is *not* the ultimate goal or even in the same neighbourhood of the full scope of freedom that the Buddhist project is aimed at at its limit. The Buddha was not ultimately trying to gain maximal freedom to pursue his genetically and culturally pre-programmed goals. He was not just trying to become less reactive and more blissful whilst pursuing them. He wasn’t just trying to work out how to maximize our happiness baseline whilst pursuing our worldly goals. He was ultimately trying to gain maximal freedom *from* his genetically and culturally pre-programmed goals. He recognized that our drive to seek pleasure and exciting experiences, to have stimulating careers and yes - even the western sacred cow of sexual experience - were arbitrary goals that are programmed into us not by our deepest wisdom and compassion but by our genetic and cultural programming. His truly revolutionary and utterly transgressive insight to the modern ear was not that we could pursue these goals more frictionlessly and blissfully. It was that at the far limit of human potential, there are actually much more satisfying goals, goals that create greater happiness and less suffering for us than even the peak of what the aforementioned goals can offer. And that - and here is the greatest blasphemy to the modern western religion of consumerist-capitalism - to taste this far limit eventually, at some point very far down the path, involves letting go of the preset goals that seem so obviously good and worthwhile to us prior to glimpsing the fruit of nibbana. To re-iterate - I think it’s wonderful how vastly Buddhist techniques can impact our freedom and happiness relative to our mundane goals. The freedom and bliss I’ve unlocked for myself by doing this far beyond words. But we can recognise all that whilst still having the humility - such a hard quality for the collective know-it-all modern west - to see that this is not the end of the path or even anything close to it. Just because we can’t conceive of a world where completely releasing our worldly pursuits could be more satisfying than blissfully pursuing them, this doesn’t mean the Buddha couldn’t conceive of this. And even if we don’t believe what the Buddha said was true, we can do that disbelieving without misappropriating the terms he used to define his vision. I honestly find it ludicrous to hear people describe themselves as “stream enterers” because no longer experience a conscious center to their phenomenological field or have experienced some kind of blip in awareness during meditation. Or when they claim to have “broken the fourth fetter” because they have become less reactive to not getting their mundane desires met. Or when they claim to have “broken the seventh fetter” because they’ve gained some measure of insight into the relativity of good / bad, beautiful / ugly etc. These are all of course worthy and fantastic goals. Hugely liberating, unlocking vast new levels of happiness But equating them to the most advanced stages of Buddhist practice is utterly absurd. It has the feeling of an infant describing themselves as an Olympic gold medalist because they just finished potty training. The Buddhist fetters refer to quite advanced stages of practice where one totally, entirely lets go of pursuing goals relating to worldly concerns (with the exception of compassionate behaviour). Not just becoming less reactive to not getting them, not just appreciating the ultimate relativity or the goals, not just pursuing them feeling all blissful when you don’t get them. It’s about total release - a total revolution in what goals are worth pursuing as a human being. Totally letting go of the pursuit of almost everything that modern western society holds dear in favour of goals that utterly transcend our illusory existence as some arbitrary individual person. In ways that are deeply, deeply challenging to the western psyche. A stream enterer is someone who has utterly lost interest in worldly goals, seeing them all as “fetters” that constrain their single-minded pursuit of nibbana. They want to actually be free of these fetters, not just be less reactive to them. Breaking later fetters is all about eliminating these motivations one by one, not about becoming less reactive whilst your pursue them or increasing your baseline happiness whilst you do so. It’s very hard to talk about this topic without sounding like I’m trying to diminish the more (relatively) early stage goals of living a non-reactive, blissful, peaceful life that centers compassion in amongst other worldly goals. These are such wonderful, and worthy goals - ones I’ve gained so much from myself - that I’d never want to diminish them. But please, can we all stop appropriating terms from the far end of the Buddhist path to describe stages that come so very very far before them. It’s the worst kind of spiritual arrogance - the type that limits our spiritual potential by obscuring the full possibilities of the human condition. It is a wonderful thing to celebrate and honour the beautiful impacts that meditative practice can have at a mundane level. But this can be done without trying to squash the Buddha’s ultimate project down into the tiny visions of those who haven’t even opened their hearts to the idea that what the Buddha said he was ultimately aiming towards is actually something real and worthwhile. Much less mastered the final most advanced stages of attaining to it.