[Michael Chui]

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

I don't want to hijack this thread, but this discussion on different types of "experience" seriously opened a floodgate of insights for me. But it didn't warrant starting a new thread, so I'm posting them here, and some of this post is also related to "accumulated experience" that Shaden talks about.

Well, threads are hardly in limited supply. If you feel you should branch it, feel free to copy any posts over as you like, etc., etc. Or if Shaden doesn't like the fork.

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

There seems to be no escape from direct experience.

Right. And eventually, it becomes mind-blowing and maddening to exhaustively consider it all, considering everything is necessarily "meta". One of the reasons the mind is so labyrinthic is precisely because it's self-reflective. To cite Heisenberg, the act of measuring changes what is being measured: you're necessarily always wrong.

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

Is it possible to go beyond, or transcend, direct experience?

Perhaps. I can't claim to have done so, but I haven't given the idea much thought. It demands a much more rigorous definition of "experience" than that which has been provided here. And without such limits, experience easily slips into self-reflection; that is to say: imagine two walls, upon which hang two mirrors. Look into one mirror.

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

To transcend, means to also include.

I like that.

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

But here's a quote that I think summarizes this:

I think there's a better quote, but I'm disinclined to go hunting for it tonight. To summarize it for others (skip down a bit if you know it already), the essential idea is this:

In learning, there are three stages.

1) Ignorance, wherein you do not know what you are doing. You flail around, and perhaps you do well, and perhaps you do not. It is uncontrolled and foolish.
2) Sophistication, wherein you have learned rules, boundaries, theories, and so forth, but become trapped by this knowledge. In this case, you are controlled, but ultimately ineffective, crippled by an excess of reflection.
3) Artlessness, wherein you have internalized the rules to a point where you are capable of breaking them based on when they apply to the situation. Having achieved control, you now achieve effectiveness.

There are three stellar examples of this, though if you think for just a moment, you will come up with another dozen. Consider breakdancing. In the beginning, you're an imbecile, trying moves that you can't do, but every now and then, moving to the music, you do something really cool. Then, you practice and practice and learn specific moves, and maybe you tie them together. But you can't use this to real music, because it doesn't flow. At a certain point, you achieve rhythm, and the music guides you in how you dance as you like.

The second example is playing musical instruments. Banging on the keyboard is ignorant, uncontrolled, and melody comes accidentally. Then you're taught theory, shown pieces, and you practice. But you can only play pieces that you've memorized, and while that's well and good, you're not quite there yet. The last stage is the mastery of improv, where you can come up with melody on the spot. Check out Jennifer Lin at TED.

The third example is fencing. The overwhelming majority of martial arts are unarmed kids punching the air, popularized by Karate Kid. Fencers, on the other hand, tend to be more effective at transcending the sophistication of the punching bag and moving to real combat. I still whisper to myself the names of the manuevers I make, when I remember them... extend, lunge, disengage, double lunge. But the speed and ferocity with which two people clash, parrying and riposting, is nigh artistic.

===Explanation over===

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

Sooooooo... along the same lines of thinking above about moving beyond "accumulated" experience, I wonder if it's possible to move beyond the "direct" kind of experience too.

It sounds completely sensible from my theoretic standpoint. What you seem to be describing is well-documented by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as flow, and I think you're already familiar with the term.

The problem with using the word "experience" here, however, is that you're not talking about the passive reception of the world. Flow, on the other hand, necessarily breaks down the barrier between passivity and activity: just like the Shaolin "Sticky Hands" technique, to receive is to give, or like Lao-Tzu said, non-action is action.

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

If anything, "waking up" is more like personal destruction.

I still need to think about this some more, but I'm wondering if the process of "transcending direct experience" is more like (a) another level of personal development, or (b) the first step of personal destruction.

Both, I'd say. Flow is definitely not the point at which enlightenment and personal development split apart. FWIW, Steve's idea of PD does not seem to be the sort that McKenna describes. I have not read McKenna, however, so I can't speak to that.

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

This reminds of reading somewhere about the goal "to die before you die". Is it possible to die subjectively without dying objectively?

This concept is actually pretty common in religious thought, and is a huge reason why people think religion is all about explaining death. Because one of the biggest advantages of believing in after-death is you understand that death is not an ending, however they interpret that.

The level of metaphor you think "subjective death" is at depends very strongly on how you define "life" and "death". I'll invite you to do that before I offer mine.

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

It's like being an employer and then asking your employee (your mind) to draw you up a detailed cost/benefit report on all the reasons why that employee should be fired.

While this analogy is certainly interesting, I shy away from it because it introduces an unnecessary dichotomy between you and your mind.

Originally Posted by Glass Joe

If you had a rootkit laying around somewhere in your head, how could you ever be aware of it? Because if you ever made an "API call" to check for the existence of a rootkit, the rootkit would just return a result saying that everything was A-OK.

See Godel's Incompleteness Theorem for more mind-warping thought. The essential insight it shows is that you can never understand something completely without stepping outside of it. Take this up ad infinitum and eventually you reach the Universe, which we define to be all of existence, and thus impossible to completely understand.