The Science of Enlightenment, by Shinzen Young

Last updated on 

How to become enlightened.

This is one of my favourite books ever, now, but it's hard to say if that's because of its intrinsic qualities or just because I met it at the right time. (If you go for it I recommend the audiobook: it's half lectures on Buddhism and half actual meditations, and the meditations would be hard to use on the page).

some claims in the book

  • Heraclitus was maybe the first enlightened Westerner?
  • A stone buddha can "dance", because once you're fully awake you realise that your eyes are constantly darting and moving and seeing slightly different angles etc, and if you really pay attention you realise that the image of the buddha is dancing. And with the patience of millenia, even mountains are dancing, in the sense of changing and accreting and eroding and so on. So everything is ultimately undulatory, if you pay enough attention.
  • I'd previously had the idea that "the point" of meditation, on one level, was to "disassemble" the movie that we see through our eyes into the still images that compose it, a series of stills that each flickers into and out of existence briefly, and only seems to create a coherent whole. But Young seems to be saying that that's just a middle step, and that later you reach a level of seeing everything as "undulatory, vibratory," more wave than particle.
  • at some point on his road to enlightenment, Young started seeing giant and very lifelike bugs in his everyday vision, e.g. coming towards him down the university campus. And he believes this is ultimately not-different from ordinary experience. "It's not so much that the hallucinatory becomes real, but that what you previously called real proves itself to have certain aspects of a hallucination". The mind is a creative process. (I can't pretend to understand this!, but it's an interesting claim.)
  • I fear I'm going to butcher this, but: Young claims that consensus reality is like a surface on top of the true nature of reality. Instead of walking around on that surface, you can burrow downwards (towards the true nature of reality). It's possible to go straight down, and if you do you'll eventually hit bedrock (the understanding off the true nature of reality.) However, as you go down, you can also end up exploring sideways at these different lower levels, and thinking you've found the Spiritual Truth. Many successful spiritual gurus are just leading people around horizontally on these lower levels, and this is a temptation that you should avoid. You should first get to the bedrock, and only then (possibly, if relevant) explore on the intermediate levels.

    When the "Zen people" (as he calls them) say (something like) "if you see god on your way to enlightenment, hit him" – I may or may not be confusing this with "if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him" – they're saying, don't be distracted by the (very real-feeling) experiences of the hallucinations etc that you see on your way to enlightenment.

Is it a good idea for an unelightened person like me to attempt to jot down the teachings about enlightenment? Maybe not, maybe I'm more likely to mislead you than to point you anywhere useful, since I'm trying to parrot something I don't understand myself. The book seems good to me though – even though I don't really understand it, I feel like he has good moments and sentences where I think I get a glimpse of it, and that glimpse feels true.