Ok, I rescind my claim that the three marks are merely pedagogical. [This is a claim I’ve made on private fora.] I have recently acquired what I believe are the “true apparent referents” of at least two of them. I think the language used to describe them is fine (no-self, impermanence).
Hasty toy model: If one imagines the mind as a landscape that can be gathered and ungathered into different conceptual configurations, some better than others, some “closer to the metal” than others, some deeper than others. Then the “true” three marks are quite deep. (Deeper means that, all things being equal, one will likely pass through more, rather than less, conceptual stages before reaching the deeper ones.) And, once you “gather” properly, you potentially “see through” that gathering, transcend it, on the way to pure awareness, or whatever.
I’ve taken, on net, a “breadth-first” transformation path, sort of shaving off large swaths of territory before descending a micrometer to shave off more. My path has been very “psychological.”
I now believe what Ingram did is pin-point, depth-first searches, over and over again. Each pin-point contact with a “tiny patch” of one of the three marks produced a cessation or fruition-like experiences. So, he sort of hardcore “reified” the three marks and went hunting.
People who go depth-first seem more likely to describe extreme “integration hardship” post punctate enlightenment-ish experiences. And they also do a syncretic collection of practices besides meditation, before and after they’ve felt like they’ve “finished.”
People who go breadth-first seem to not get very far or to lead gentle ok lives or to get really far after like thirty-plus years.
I could imagine some combination of breadth-first and depth-first being ideal. (These are abstractions, of course.) While my overall approach has been more breadth-first, I did a bunch of depth-first-ish things closer to the beginning. This mirrors the route of extreme dry insight to stack up supramundane insights, followed by much more concentration-style practices.
I think depth-first is going to tend to be problematic because of “improper-” or “over-reification,” smashing headfirst into inessential or dangerous parts of the state space as well as potentially terrible integration experiences.
And breadth-first is going to tend to problematic because of scattered “getting nowhere” or, worse, getting potentially lost in bad places for a very, very long time.
I like my approach because it introduces wayfinding concepts that are more general and more abstract than the three marks (or other dogmatic approaches), allowing for idiosyncratic and personalized wayfinding without sacrificing “sharpness.” Relatively speaking.
(Having just now encountered what I believe to be the “true three marks referents,” do I rescind my claim of being done, for some flavor of done? [I don not claim to be “done-done.”] Or do I wish I had been more trusting of the scriptures or, say, Ingram’s material? Not really. It would have been such a narrow journey, harrowing in different ways than my own. I’m not left cobbling to together many, many syncretic practices and frameworks to supplement “hardcore noting with provisional ontological commitments,” in order to continue making progress. Re, “done,” I’m hitting the three marks because there’s seemingly just not much left to do. It’s been by incidental process of elimination. And, afaict, my life wouldn’t have been better if I’d punched through sooner. Emptiness was most excellent, but these aren’t changing things too much. Maybe they are usually tangled together with a bunch of other stuff that makes contact with them much more intense/profound/freeing/positive. Not sure.)
While I don’t think they’re “merely pedagogical” anymore, they don’t seem different in kind to the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many mezo and almost-as-deep apparent referents that I’ve already come across.
Whether it’s psychological, supramundane, therapy, meditation, anything–it’s the same playing field. It’s all mind. Ken Wilber had a thing where one needs to get through X% of their shadow stuff in order to do the enlightenment thing, and, so, even though some people claim enlightenment is orthogonal to psychology, he disagreed. This take of his seems completely accurate in my experience. And, so, say, getting through 100% of one’s shadow, as it were, plus other technical debt, is equivalent to full enlightenment. But, completely running out of “three marks-ness” to process, being all done with the three marks, is just another waypoint on the path, and seemingly a somewhat flexible one as how much of that processing one does earlier or later. (I’m *not* saying “fully processing the three marks” is how, say, Ingram thinks of it. It’s a bit of a straw.)
So, again, all the cycles, the fruitions, the entering through through doors corresponding to particular marks, this seems to be an artifact of a particular wayfinding strategy, and one of the better ones, along several dimensions. And/but, as far as I can tell, fruitions, cycling, etc., aren’t necessary. Maybe a few are are sort of “incidentally necessary,” but in some sense “emergent” and not reflective of something perfectly essential to progress. This is sort getting into “vague hairsplitting” so I’ll stop here.
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https://github.com/meditationstuff/protocol_1

