16 Feb Notes on Emergent Paradigms Part II: The Contemplative Renaissance
This this post was originally posted here
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This is the second dispatch in a new series on Emergent Paradigms.
Here’s Part I, in case you missed it.
By Emergent Paradigms, we mean new science, frameworks, and interventions that portend a radical departure from current understanding and practices.
Of course, Psychedelics fit the mold but are only one of a handful of forthcoming advances that portend a radical future of health and well-being.
Today, in Part II, we look at the Contemplative Renaissance.
“It is not unreasonable that in contact with modern science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original discoveries of [the Buddha] rigorized and extended, will play a large part in the direction of human destiny.”
—Shinzen Young
On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister, a young Englishman, became the first person in recorded history to run a mile in under four minutes.
Before Bannister’s accomplishment, the sub-4-minute mile was considered impossible—literally beyond the human body’s capacity.
However, his success broke the collective psychological barrier, and in the following years, many more runners achieved the same feat.
This phenomenon—when one individual achieves something previously deemed impossible—has become known as the Bannister Effect.
We are in a similar situation with meditation and contemplative practices in the West.
Growing numbers of “normal people” are achieving the results the Buddha—and other figures—promised.
I am not talking about supernatural abilities like mind reading or seeing the future—but qualities like the cultivation of profound joy, equanimity, happiness independent of circumstances, and sustained selflessness.
Sure, the internet makes such cases more available, but more importantly, we have a cohort of teachers willing to share their own experiences and frame the more esoteric concepts, practices, and results in ways that make them more accessible to modern people.
As I graduated from college in the mid-2000s, the mainstream culture was just getting introduced to Mindfulness.
In 1979, John Kabbat Zinn developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a secularized approach to Buddhist-inspired ideas.
This framework taught Buddhist concepts like non-judgemental awareness, acceptance, and non-striving, along with focused attention practices like Mindfulness of the breath at the nose and body scanning.
The MBSR framework intentionally leaves out esoteric concepts like emptiness, selflessness, karma, and rebirth, as well as more profound and advanced meditation practices and the states of consciousness they induce.
By the 2000s, MBSR had made its way into hospitals, schools, and other institutions as a tool for stress reduction.
At the same time, the most established Buddhist meditation community in the West consisted of teachers and centers under the banner of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS).
The most well-known teachers in this lineage are people like Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg, with established retreat centers like Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and Spirit Rock in California.
However, despite IMS’ Buddhist affiliation, they are reluctant to acknowledge and encourage peak states and ultimate goals (enlightenment) and—in my experience—dismiss them as distractions and unrealistic pursuits.
Like MBSR, the dominant conceptual offerings are stress relief through non-judgemental awareness and non-striving.
In these environments, teachers are usually unwilling to talk about their own experiences—in the parlance of Buddhism, their levels of attainment.
The last ~10 years have seen several “Roger Bannisters of Meditation.”
These people have longstanding practices and share their experiences, including their level—and fruits—of attainment.
They acknowledge that the goal of these practices is not merely stress relief but the cessation of suffering and, in the common parlance—awakening.
Of course, you could say there is no way to prove their levels of attainment, but that is not the point.
The point is that through these teachers—like Shinzen Young, Daniel Ingram, and Sam Harris—who acknowledge the ultimate aim and disclose their experiences, the ‘Overton Window,’ so to speak, has shifted, and self-cultivated peak experiences and transformation are now on the table as a realistic goal in this lifetime for a lot more people than it was ten years ago.
In an article from 2015, Shinzen Young says:
“I’m one of those teachers who’s comfortable with the “E-word”—perhaps because my very first teacher Okamura Keishin talked about kenshō and satori as realistic goals.”
In his opus, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, Daniel Ingram notes:
“…if we are to have a clear standard for whether or not these techniques and teachings are working for us, it is vital that we have a thorough knowledge of what is possible and even expected of those who really practice well.”
Harris goes so far as to point his audience of rational atheists to the radical idea of the illusory nature of the self:
“…the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion.”
The result has been that aspirations have gone beyond mere stress relief.
Through first-hand accounts of these teachers and others like them, modern practitioners aim higher.
What often gets lost in Roger Bannister’s 4-minute mile story is the innovation that he brought to his training.
In Bannister’s day, most runners primarily focused on building endurance through extensive long-distance runs at a steady pace.
Before Bannister broke the record, he developed a radical—for the time—training routine.
He turned to science to inform his methodology and incorporated speed work, interval training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and psychological approaches.
This was unheard of at the time.
Similarly, the current contemplative renaissance can be described as a period of innovation and experimentation in mixing techniques from different traditions and adopting neuroscience and technology.
For example, the early-stage startup Jhourney seeks to make deep states of absorption known as the Jhanas more readily available through neurotech.
Another example is the work of Shamil Chandaria, who applies modern neuroscientific understandings of how the brain creates conscious awareness to the contemplative path.
Just as Bannister’s feat shattered the psychological barriers surrounding human physical potential, so too are modern meditators and teachers breaking through the limitations once thought to constrain the realms of inner peace, joy, and enlightenment.
This evolution is not just about expanding the Overton Window of what’s considered attainable in spiritual practice but represents a broader cultural shift towards valuing inner well-being and understanding the mind’s capabilities.
Transformative mental states, previously considered esoteric relics of the past, can, in fact, be the cornerstone of our modern lives.
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