Zen and the art of speedrunning enlightenment
A personal story & a sort of a Techno-Buddhist manifesto
One time a new student came to a Zen master. The Zen master asked him:
— What is the sound of one hand clapping?
The student immediately slapped the Zen Master with his right hand producing a crisp loud sound. And at that moment, the student was enlightened — the koan was solved non-conceptually.
(The student uncovered a glitch in the Zen skill tree and now holds the top of the kensho% in the Zen category).
In gaming there is a sport called speedrunning. The goal of speedrunning is to complete a game in the shortest amount of time possible. Gamers thoroughly learn the inner workings of the game they are playing and almost always end up using shortcuts not intended by game designers or glitches arising from bugs in the code. Sometimes gamers end up finishing the game right after it begins when a normal walkthrough requires dozens of hours.
Speedrunning can be done casually: you just take a game and try to set a personal best time, just like with regular running where you might try to complete the 1km around your block as fast as possible. It can also be done competitively: for many games there are dozens of Usain Bolts of speedrunning competing with each other.
Speedrunning enlightenment
There is something people refer to as enlightenment. I hold a pretty minimalist view of it. You are not going to levitate or shoot lasers from your eyes. You are not going to stand above everyone else morality-wise. Nor are you going to achieve freedom from negative emotions and suffering.
That said! Your suffering is going to be reduced, you’ll approach life more lightly and skillfully and have some insight into what the mind is doing at the low-level and into what consciousness fundamentally is. It’s an OK deal in my book, even if it doesn’t live up to the traditional buddhist marketing hype.
Not all roads to enlightenment are created equal. Some go faster than others. Some slower. Some have signs “Enlightenment This Way →” while leading nowhere. Nevertheless getting enlightened is a repeatable process — and it can be speedrun. New techniques can be uncovered — and are getting uncovered with each passing year
Consider competing with the Buddha
The Buddha was just some guy.
Unlike with founders of other religions there are no claims of his divinity — he was quite literally just some guy. He was a rich kid — a prince born to royal parents in a small kingdom in Nepal. Before he was born there was a prophecy made that he’d become either a great monarch or a spiritual leader. So his parents sheltered him from any outward signs of suffering in an attempt to steer him away from the spiritual path. However, on his first visit to the real world outside of his palace he encountered suffering: he saw an old man, an ill man and a corpse. This moved him so much he abandoned his old life and he stepped onto a spiritual path — on the quest for enlightenment trying to solve the problem of suffering.
There was no divine intervention here on his quest. In a true empirical fashion the Buddha was fucking around and finding out. He renounced his old life and stepped on the path of extreme asceticism. Then he worked with multiple teachers, learning from them but eventually leaving them all not fully satisfied with their teachings. After almost dying from malnourishment, he also abandoned extreme asceticism in favor of the middle way, a path of moderation he formulated. Eventually, after spending a bunch of time alone in deep meditation he attained enlightenment.
I call myself a Techno-Buddhist but I wish more people would compete with the Buddha rather than follow him. The Buddha — if he was living today — wouldn’t be following Buddhism. Just like in his era he’d be fucking around and finding out: he’d be meditating, doing weird psychedelics, strapping EEG headsets to his head, perhaps working on brain implants or building artificial consciousness. Or maybe he’d be up to some truly weird shit.
I wish more people would compete with the Buddha, and not for social status — a position in spiritual or scientific enlightenment — but for uncovering and solving mysteries of the inner workings of the human mind. Buddhism gets many things about the human mind right — but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon and we have reached a peak whatever-you-think-Buddhism-is-trying-to-do.
When it comes to his personal quest (as opposed to expanding humanity’s knowledge) the Buddha wasn’t following a predefined path, and, perhaps, neither should we. Buddhism itself is not a unitary religion, it has multiple traditions with different models of enlightenment and different paths on how to reach there as well as different ideas of what to do with it and what it means. While traditions typically bow to the Buddha — both physically and metaphorically — they certainly are competing branches of human knowledge.
My experience speedrunning (the first stage of) enlightenment
Like the Buddha I’m also just some guy. Unlike the Buddha I was born to average-wage parents in Siberia and not a rich royal family in Nepal. The existence of suffering was obvious to me too: my mental health had been garbage for a long time. Depression, anxiety, chronic pain, a ton of accumulated trauma over the years led to my internal experience of constant internal conflict of multiple parts being in a Mexican stand-off with each other. Abandoning the confines of my mind proved to be pretty difficult. But eventually I succeeded by doing a bunch of meditation and copious amounts of psychedelics (that’s a different story I want to publish someday).
I first encountered meditation as a simple scientific™ practice: try to keep your attention on your breath while gently letting go of whatever else arises in your mind. The instructions also reassured me that this practice is very scientific, and proved to work in scientific studies by scientists doing real sciencing. May contain trace amounts of a weird eastern religion, but no more than that. I meditated on and off (mostly off) and it helped a bit. I put only a dozen hours into meditation over a few years before getting serious about it.
A few years later I wanted to learn to meditate better to manage stress better. So I decided to find and read a book on meditation. I found “The Mind Illuminated” by Culadasa (aka John Yates), a neuroscience PhD turned meditation teacher. The book cover featured an artistic picture of the Buddha’s face — the connection with a weird eastern religion was clear. Nevertheless, the “neuroscience PhD” credentials of the author reassured me that perhaps the book isn’t too far off from the scientific Zeitgeist. It’d be real fucking weird to focus on your breath in an unscientific fashion. Couldn’t be me.
The book featured some useful tips for the practice that I still use to this day like “if something is bothering you and you can’t simply let go, try to hold that thing as a meditation object” (a retelling of the advice, not an actual quote). The book also talked about the importance of setting an intention before meditating. Enlightenment was discussed seriously in it, although I couldn’t quite understand what it was. To follow the book’s advice I’d set an intention like “I’d like to meditate in a proper way for 30 minutes focusing on certain aspects of the practice. Also, I wouldn’t mind reaching enlightenment I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [you asian weirdos]”.
A couple months later I stumbled upon a review of “Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha” by Scott Alexander of SlateStarCodex and AstralCodexTen. Scott Alexander is a science- and rationality-minded author who often easily dissects complex topics and I greatly admired his systematic thinking skills. And in his review… he… took… enlightenment… seriously? This was like accidentally consuming a red pill: my worldview cracked a bit. In front of me there was a gaping hole in reality, and I even seemingly had a technical manual to explore it, so I couldn’t resist but follow it. I started to obsess with meditation and enlightenment.
My first step was actually reading the book. The book cover looked like it was designed by an esoteric guru who has just learned that MS Word has cool font effects. The words “Mastering the Core Teaching of The Buddha” dropped shadows over a schematic human figure sitting in a lotus shape while radiating brown rays of light with purple floating fluids. There is a saying “Don’t judge the book for the cover”, but a couple of years before I would have absolutely judged the book by its cover to be an esoteric nonsense from a dollar book store for people into alien reptiloids from planet Nibiru (and I would be totally wrong).
The book talked about a meditation style called Vipassana (aka insight meditation). Vipassana emphasizes focusing on a meditation object as a way to achieve insight into what your neuronal machinery is doing at the lower level — and how it constructs reality from the tiniest bricks of your experience. To simplify things: the more insight you have → the more your mind changes → the more enlightened you are.
“Mastering Core Teachings of the Buddha” lays out a series of steps you can take to reach enlightenment with extensive and technical descriptions of each one. Reading it is a bit like reading a detailed walkthrough of a video game. Sort of like “after finding a hidden entrance to the next stage you can expect such and such mental effects and your meditative skills would get such and such upgrades BUT be careful after it you’d have to figure out a more complicated puzzle you can’t easily walk away from”.
The path contains sixteen stages of progress of insight each deepening intuitive insight and presenting unique challenges. It culminates with an event called “cessation” — a cessation of your entire consciousness for a split second (no more than a few ms). Cessation may sound like nothing, but for whatever reason consciousness blinking ends up breaking a lot of one’s mind’s implicit models of itself. Once cessation is reached, the meditator is said to attain “stream entry” or “the first path” (the first stage of enlightenment). Sometimes people reach stream entry without getting a cessation, but this happens less often.
According to Vipasanna, to get fully enlightened you need to repeat this process four times, getting the 2nd, 3rd and the final 4th path after the first one. Sort of like doing more walkthroughs of a video game.
In late 2019 and early 2020 over a few months I followed through the first path on Progress of Insight Maps which culminated in a cessation — and thus reaching stream entry. Over these months my mind let go of many default “factory” assumptions of how it works. Where there would be a single “I” controlling things, there now was a looser collection of semi-autonomous processes depending on each other. Free will became an illusory feeling that arises in my consciousness rather than an undeniable fact of life. The mind started to feel more like a deterministic mechanism that can be fine-tuned and modified — to some extent.
And like I said, cessation may sound like nothing, but actually it caused my mind to significantly update itself. The biggest updates for my mind with cessation and stream entry were intuitively realizing the following:
“You” are inhabiting a convincing mind-matrix, a world simulation built for “you” by your own mind. You are never looking at the chair directly, you are looking at a representation of it in your mind. This isn’t a matter of loading an abstract philosophico-logical statement in your mind and assigning a value of “Truth” to it. It’s a sum of the tons of micro insights from your previous meditative experience, so by looking at the chair you can get some sense of how it’s constructed: the slightly noisy edges of the object form legs, sit, backs which in turn make the entire chair. You can tap deeper into lower-level details of object detection process inside your mind.
From Steven Lehar’s “Cartoon epistemology” There is no definitive anything in your experience. Consciousness is sort of a global workspace where mental objects — blobs of approximated meaning — get dropped into. Everything is a mental object and thus pretty much anything can be held as a meditation object: edges of a chair, the specific “aggregate” chair, the concept of chairs in general and even the word “chair” abstracted away from the underlying referenced meaning. These objects are a lot more uniform: “cut from the same cloth” and constructed by the same preconscious algorithm.
Deepening of previous “no-self” realizations acquired in the previous stages. Much like the world is a bit illusory though it corresponds to something, the “you” in the center of your experience is also illusory. You start to feel more like an unfolding process without inherent true identity; your sense of identity gets lighter and you start to play with it a lot more.
On a practical level, you also get a sense of how your emotional reactions are constructed from your previous experience and start to get more and more unrestricted by them because your mind can optimize away past inflexible reactions. Buddhists call this “deconditioning” (as in — the mind de-pavlovs itself), psychologists would call it — I don’t know — “simplifying of emotional schemas”. As a bonus, these practical insights led to psychedelics becoming more effective: during psychedelic trips I could look at a “belief lattice” and “stretch it out” in a parallel fashion, simplifying it.
Theravada speedruns enlightenment
Typical standard “mindfulness meditation” instructions come from Vipassana, the same Vipassana described above. They often come with a cultural impression that they are based on a tradition that existed for more than two millennia. And this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Vipassana was reinvented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Theravada (a school of Buddhism). The art of insight meditation was simply lost over centuries. The original religious scriptures were there, but monks chanted them rather than follow them.
No actual teachers of Vipassana remained. People didn’t believe it’s possible to reach enlightenment in one lifetime — until several people challenged this assumption and put a lot of hard work into teasing working instructions out of contradictory scriptures with lots of trial and error. Some people succeeded and we ended up with several different variations of Vipassana. These people weren’t just following the Buddha, they were recreating enlightenment techniques from scratch starting from conflicting scriptures — thus effectively competing with him.
The author of the most popular system, Mahasi Sayadaw, a burmese monk, introduced several innovations:
Skipping explicitly developing concentration (samatha), a meditative stability and tranquility, in the assumption it’d take care of itself while you focus on the raw insight.
Prioritizing reaching stream entry, the first stage of enlightenment.
Eliminating rituals and teaching lay people
Notice that he finds skips, drops unnecessary stuff and aims for faster completion of the path. He also claimed that it’s possible to reach stream entry, the first stage of enlightenment, within a month of practice. It’s not a stretch to call his style speedrunning.
(Further reading: ’Theravada reinvents meditation’ and 'What got left out of “Meditation”’ by David Chapman)
Exploring other traditions
One of the potential problems with Vipassana is that it was invented by people that are into renunciation and asceticism. And it’s not something I want to do. I want to firmly engage with the world and be effective in it rather than becoming an uncaring zombie, even if I’m blissed out. Potential side effects like these ones make me currently a bit wary of speedrunning 2nd, 3rd and 4th paths Vipassana-style.
That said, contemporary Vipassana teachers seem to put less emphasis on renunciation and more on perceiving the mind’s phenomena clearly. We have reinvented and modified Vipassana many times in the history of humanity, and perhaps we could do it again?
Beside Vipassana-specific considerations, I think engaging with just a single tradition could be myopic: you risk becoming a fish that doesn’t notice the water it’s in. I’m setting Vipassana aside for now, and I’m exploring other Buddhist traditions. What do they have to say about the practice? What’s their way of life? What’s their conception of enlightenment?
Zen (and the art of speedrunning enlightenment)
A month ago I started exploring Zen. A month is not a lot of time so I have only preliminary impressions. There is this cultural impression of Zen as a school of Buddhism where masters tell disciples incomprehensible riddles, beat them with a stick and make them sit in uncomfortable poses without providing much instruction. All while telling them that they are already enlightened.
I am tentatively concerned that there are more than a few grains of truth in this impression.
Zen contains valuable philosophy: being in the moment, non-doing, non-achievement, non-striving. Zen is non-goal-oriented which is doubly valuable because it cuts across the Zeitgeist of the busy Western world. Zen’s meditation instructions are simple: zazen aka just-sitting (about what it sounds like). And my impression is that for post-stream-entry people Zen has interesting territory to explore.
At the same time, Zen’s approach to enlightenment is “just get enlightened, bro” — spontaneously getting a flash of insight recognizing “one’s true nature”. Oftentimes there is a focus on direct transmission from a Zen master: a sort-of a mind-to-mind transmission of insight that causes an update in a student’s mind. A famous example is the Buddha picking up a flower, twirling it in front of his disciples and then one of them smiling, getting something and becoming enlightened.
Humans provide a lot of important emotional information non-verbally, so I’m not questioning the idea of direct transmission — it sort of looks like “skilled advanced vibing” to me. But my main concern with Zen is that with its non-goal-orientedness and bro-just-get-enlightened-ness it ends up throwing the baby with the bathwater. Zen people could spend some time writing down what’s going on in the human mind a lot more clearly, but they choose not to because it’s antithetical to their ethos of “c’mon just get it bro”. The world would be better off if Zen people wrote more systematic guides about what they found.
Zen is possibly the most non-speedrunning tradition (if not anti-speedrunning). I think this even shows in the numbers. Zen’s kensho is roughly equivalent to Vipassana’s stream-entry (if not completely equivalent). But as far as I understand — Vipassana produces stream entry much more reliably and at a higher rate than Zen produces kensho. (As for the source of this claim — I remember seeing it somewhere a couple of years ago, and I can’t find the source now. If I find the source again, I’ll update this article).
Psychedelics
The Buddha didn’t have access to psychedelics. So Buddhism completely ignores their existence. But we don’t have too. I’ll be very brief here: this chapter expanded properly would make another essay of the size of this one.
Psychedelics aren’t merely drugs that make you see cool visuals for a few hours and then make you feel a vaguely more spiritual the next couple of days. They are the closest thing we currently have to having a root/read-write access to our own mind and its predictive models. So they can help roll back surprising amounts of emotional damage.
They can be helpful for accelerating Vipassana progress too. A famous Vipassana teacher I worked with didn’t make a distinction between insight acquired during meditation and psychedelics: insight is insight. My personal experience supports this too.
Besides being helpful on our individual paths, they are also tools for understanding consciousness in general. In physics, studying normal everyday matter isn’t enough to gain full understanding, so we build colliders to produce exotic states of matter with unusual properties. Similar to this, our normal waking consciousness is only a small corner of possible conscious states — and psychedelics allow us to induce exotic conscious states to gain new understanding.
Tool-assisted speedrunning: AI-assisted enlightenment
The Buddha didn’t know how to make hardware and program it. But we do — and this means we don’t have to rely on written or oral meditation instructions alone plus conversations with teachers. These things are valuable, but we can make tools augmenting them.
Perhaps in the future we will have AI-assisted enlightenment: AI-enabled hardware devices guiding you towards enlightenment.
This idea is not that much of a stretch. There is already a company called Jhourney making a jhana helmet. Jhanas are non-addictive pleasurable blissful meditative absorption states. The helmet is an EEG device that picks electric signals from the brain and uses neurofeedback to guide you to achieve them faster. EEG is a relatively crude tool: it picks signals from the skin rather than from the brain directly, but jhanas leave enough of a signature to make the device potentially viable.
This helmet isn’t vipassana per se, but learning jhanas can make you progress faster on the path of insight. Thinking further, perhaps Vipassana can be enhanced too. Let me speculate on the possibility and usefulness of one such device.
On the progress of insight there is a stage called “Knowledge of the Arising and Passing of Phenomena” (typically shortened to “Arising and Passing away” or “A&P”). In it a meditator’s attention gets so precise they are able to “penetrate” the meditation object (like the sensation of breath on their nostrils) and perceive that behind the curtain this solid sensation is actually a series of individual sensations arising and passing away in quick succession several times per second. Sort of like seeing a rope on the ground, coming closer, and realizing it’s moving — it’s actually a line of ants.
Arguably, getting a meditator to A&P is even more important than getting a stream entry. A&P shows there is something unusual going on in your mind beyond what’s normally accessible “reality” and something to this thing people call “spirituality”. A&P is also a threshold where a meditator can be said to “properly know” how to meditate. Pre-A&P you are somewhat aimlessly wandering around, post-A&P you can sharpen your skills more deliberately.
The interesting thing about these individual flickering sensations making up a solid one is that their frequencies tend to correlate fairly well to the frequencies of brain waves. And we can pick up brain wave frequencies with EEG. If (and that’s an if) these frequencies are important, maybe we could also generate custom individual meditation objects tailored to each individual brain. Perhaps these could look like AI-generated mesmerizing gifs.
Why this might work:
We already have a practice of meditating with open eyes while focusing on a moving object, it is called “kasina”.
There was a study done (unrelated to meditation) where people learned things faster if stimuli was synchronized to their brain waves via EEG.
This is what we could try with the current limited tech — what comes next when we get ubiquitous brain implants? It’s best to start figuring out now!
The quest of competing with the Buddha continues
Since the beginning of time people looked in the night sky, saw the stars and wondered what they were and what they were about. Perhaps they are weird lights nailed to the heavenly sphere by a force beyond our control and comprehension. The quest for better and deeper knowledge went on and on. We built theories for different states of matter describing it mathematically. We now know that stars are giant balls of heated up plasma scattered in the ever-expanding universe. We built rockets — precisely engineered technology that repeatedly gets us closer to the stars, although we have yet to colonize the galaxy transforming it into abundance beyond our wildest dreams.
Since the beginning of time people looked into their inner cosmos, saw sparks of internal experience weaved together into a unified tapestry of an agent experiencing the world — and wondered what this is all about. Perhaps there is a force beyond our control and comprehension which sets everything in motion and causes you to get reincarnated over millions of lifetimes, and perhaps it’s possible to escape suffering into eternal peacefulness of nirvana if you work hard enough. We now know that the internal experience is described by a precise mathematical theory, enlightenment has an obvious signature in it, and we can not just reproduce this signature in a given human mind in hours but also precisely engineer blissful non-addictive conscious states thus breaking ourselves out of the confines of evolution-supplied reward architecture into pure joyful liberated agency.
The quest of competing with the Buddha continues. We don’t have a formal theory of consciousness, but eventually we will. We’ll use it to abolish suffering and then reimagine and re-engineer our subjective experience. Evolution is a harsh mistress — but post-darwinian techno-nirvana is coming.
You know, neuroscientist Erik Hoel already wrote a whole book (The World Behind the World) arguing neuroscience is in shambles, and that perhaps it is not possible to produce a theory of consciousness, as science itself is set up to tell you about what is observed: it can't tell you anything about the observer. The hard problem of consciousness is a real bitch.
I also happen to claim enlightenment myself, but I disagree with Ingram that his take on enlightenment unifies what everyone claims about enlightenment, or even that it's necessary to shred reality into ribbons, as he put it, to get to enlightenment. His' is just a take, and it seemingly works for some, but there are other ways. Probably countless other ways actually.
It is spirituality after all: this stuff isn't actually tractable to systems. Tear the sutras, as Huineng did!
This was a welcome way of thinking for someone like me who has been increasingly looking at enlightenment as something which is tangibly possible in this very life, while at the same time realizing it's not some pie in the sky phenomenon that makes you godly like most religions/proponents claim.
I have always been an experimenter, dabbling with different schools of meditation and thought and not really committing to one for life as they ask you to for success. Earlier I believed this to be an impediment to my enlightenment, now I see it as an accelerator all thanks to you.
I absolutely loved the thought of being a competitor to the Buddha, who is just another guy. And speed running enlightenment - I am hungry for more.
(P. S: Most practitioners look down on this hunger for more as craving which should be avoided at all costs. I do not believe it works this way. You need desire to even be on this path. You can keep the desire aside when you are on the mat, but without the desire for more off-mat, no progress is possible)