I hereby award @daverupa the EBT trophy (which I hereby create by fiat) for being the first one on the thread to reference a EBT by URL! 
And your closing, wonderfully terse, sentence makes me smile.
1 Like
I have no idea what is meant by ‘fully subjective’ here? Where in the early teachings do we have the Buddha saying: the formless absorptions are fully subjective?
When it was said above: the formless Jhanas are not transpersonal - what does transpersonal mean in this context? At least, I went to the effort of describing exactly what I meant when I use the term.
Clearly, the Buddha did not use this terminology - he used his own. Does anyone on this thread actually know what they are talking about? Have any of you actually experienced Jhanas - of any kind? If so, please describe what happens - prior to, during and, after?
1 Like
This cannot be experienced - an envelope of consciousness around the world -so must be relegated to box named ‘imagination’.
“Wikipedia on Transpersonal (psychology) would fit in with fine material or immaterial absorptions:
”Issues considered in transpersonal psychology include spiritual self-development, self beyond the ego, peak experiences, mystical experiences, systemic trance, spiritual crises, spiritual evolution, religious conversion, altered states of consciousness, spiritual practices, and other sublime and/or unusually expanded experiences of living”.
Then there is this:
Then the Blessed One, as soon as he perceived with his awareness the train of thought in Ven. Sona’s awareness. AN6.55
There are many instances of the Buddha becoming aware of his disciples thinking in the above manner. These are also ‘transpersonal’. The usual interaction is that the disciple learns something new he or she didn’t know before and the Buddha approves it for memorisation by his monks as being one of his teachings. Another example was mentioned in the sleepiness in meditation thread (with Ven Moggallana).
With metta
2 Likes
It’s experienced by an individual, so it’s subjective. They experience it themselves, subjectively. All experience is subjective.
That’s what it means for there to be separate individuals: they each have their own experiences. This means, subjective experiences.
Correct, but not completely divorced from ‘objective (what ever that is…)’ phenomena i.e. subjective experiences are not baseless hallucinations.
with metta
1 Like
Hallucinations are subjective, clear observation is subjective.
I think the important bit is in the distinction between those two:
A hallucination is a perception in the absence of external stimulus that has qualities of real perception. Hallucinations are vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space. They are distinguishable from these related phenomena: dreaming, which does not involve wakefulness; illusion, which involves distorted or misinterpreted real perception; imagery, which does not mimic real perception and is under voluntary control; and pseudohallucination, which does not mimic real perception, but is not under voluntary control.[1] Hallucinations also differ from “delusional perceptions”, in which a correctly sensed and interpreted stimulus (i.e., a real perception) is given some additional (and typically absurd) significance.
.
Hallucinations can occur in any sensory modality—visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, proprioceptive, equilibrioceptive, nociceptive, thermoceptive and chronoceptive.
.
A mild form of hallucination is known as a disturbance, and can occur in most of the senses above. These may be things like seeing movement in peripheral vision, or hearing faint noises and/or voices. Hallucination - Wikipedia
with metta
1 Like
The goal here is to recognize that it’s subjective in any case. Reality or illusion, it’s subjective. All y’all seem worried about this, and I don’t know why.
The OP describes the formless stuff as somehow beyond an individual’s All, which is nonsensical, as the earlier cited Sutta succinctly states.
New Agers and materialists and all sorts of folk can attain formless states. But no one can go beyond the All.
Goodoh, now don’t cherry-pick there were 3 paragraphs and you provided an answer related to the first - 2 more to go! You have given an answer that reflects your ideological commitment to naive realism.
The Buddha would also speak in this way when talking about individuals. On a deeper level of transpersonal insight he saw through the fallacy of ‘personality belief’ (sakkaya dhitti).
Personality-belief is seen-through with the attainment of the first stage of awakening ‘stream entry’ - this is Buddhism 101. When referring to ’ transpersonal insight’ I am not saying that people are not individuals who see things from their own unique vantage point.
I am saying that their sense of ‘self’, there sense of being a seperate subject comes and goes. In Jhana this seperate sense of self-hood vanishes. The meditator sitting their does not vanish but their inner sense of subjectivity vanishes and returns after the Jhana comes to an end.
1 Like
This experience you describe: it’s not an experience of a self or a personality. It is still subjective, because only that person is having that experience.
Note that secular folk have these experiences too. So, these fully subjective experiences are also within the noosphere. Your assertions don’t make sense to me, and seem flawed.
1 Like
-
No question there, just another rant about 'transpersonal, stuff.
-
Don’t ask about jhana attainments, don’t claim them. Arrogant stuff, nothing to do with your OP.
The OP’s title asked a question. The answer is, yes.
1 Like
Yes I have already heard that view expressed by you. Try not to repeat what you have said ad-nauseum!
I gave you a response, I made it clear that I was not talking about the vanishing of the meditating individual sitting on the cushion. I am talking about the state of mind of the meditator. I am saying that in Jhana there is no sense of self. There is an experience but there is no identification with what is happening. An experience with no one taking hold of the experience. This leads to the dissolution of the sense of ‘self’.
Now answer the other 2 paragraphs directly!
So, this is mostly nonsense right?
3 Likes
The opening question is about transpersonal insight in relation to Secular Buddhism. You have failed to provide an account of a single transpersonal insight. Therefore, as a Secular Buddhist you have answered the opening question.
I’m pretty sure laurence is up in the night on this one.
The most generous explanation I have is that it’s an ESL issue, where the word “subjective” has, for them, some unsavory connotation that isn’t present in my use of the term.
Otherwise, I’m the only one who’s cited Sutta on this matter…
2 Likes
This already happened. I said “2” and “3” so you’d be able to see them.
You seem sort of agitated; maybe let’s both go have a cuppa and wait it out for a spell?
1 Like
Ok, so it looks like the source of much of this dispute is just a semantic one involving three competing senses of the term “subjective.” The three senses seem to be roughly these:
-
An experience E of some individual X is subjective if and only if it is an experience that does not include any self-conception of X, or any awareness of X, itself, as the subject of the experience E.
-
An experience E of some individual X is subjective if and only if it is solely an experience of X, and not at the same time an experience of any other individual Y.
-
An experience E of some individual X is subjective if and only if it a direct and pure experience of ultimate reality, and hence is not intrinsically colored and conditioned by any previous experiences or cognitive formations of X.
Some experiences of some meditation practitioners might be subjective in the first sense because their content is “empty of self” in some way. But the same would also be true of all experiences of animals who are cognitively incapable of having self-concepts, or of experiencing conscious self-awareness, in the first place. I’m pretty sure the Buddha’s teaching is that this kind of total eradication of self-awareness, and complete elimination of I-making and my-making, only occurs at the highest level of attainment and complete liberation, and that even the higher jhana attainments involve a subtle sense of self.
Experiences will be subjective in the second sense whenever they are the experiences of a single individual, and the states and events transpiring in that individual’s mind are not literally shared by, or components of, the minds of others. I don’t know that there is anywhere in the suttas where this idea of two minds literally sharing a single experience - as opposed to having two different experiences which happen to be qualitatively identical - is ever raised.
Experiences will be subjective in the third sense whenever the intrinsic characteristics of those experiences (and not just the bare fact that the experiences are occurring in the first place as a result of practices the experiencer has undertaken) have been influenced by the previous life experiences, native mental tendencies and cognitive training of the person having the experience. Presumably most worldly experience is of this sort, and this type of subjectivity is only eradicated when moha has been completely eliminated.
I don’t think disputes about this last kind of subjectivity have much, if anything, to do with the dispute between secularists and non-secularists. Secular Buddhists understand as well as non-secularists that there is a big difference between actually having an experience, on the one hand, and only possessing some intellectual and discursive conceptualization of an experience, on the other hand. And the prior conceptual grasp of the higher experiences by non-secular Buddhists is going to be just as defective, and just as colored by intellectual conditioning and life experiences, as the prior conceptual grasp of these experiences of secularists. Only once one has actually had the relevant experiences themselves will one know directly what they are like. But that’s a problem for both secular and non-secular mediators and path-followers alike.
2 Likes
Once having had the experience only then can you know - in hindsight - what it is like. It is obvious to me through direct experience that formless Jhanas are without a trace of subjectivity. I hate to be a bringer of inconvenient News to information buffs but, there is not any form of subjectivity in any Jhana in the Buddha’s teachings. The experience of the beautiful Jhanas are just the experience of the beautiful - no subject. Likewise, the formless Jhanas are without any sense of self. This is a transpersonal insight not a theoretical conjecture. To understand the significance of the non-subjective nature of Jhana is only understood by the Jhani. You have to have transpersonal happenings before you can see why they have an indispensable place in the Buddha’s teachings. In fact, without them the Buddha would not have been able to set the wheel in motion.
An inability to see this is to reduce the Buddha’s teachings to a belief system - an ideology, secular or religious - that happens to produce a few therapeutic outcomes. Something akin to new-age nonsense or Secular Buddhism. Sad but true!
I saw a Sutta quote on another thread where the Buddha stated: “I did not claim full and complete AWAKENING before I had entered and left the eight Jhanas - and, nirodhasamapatti* - in ascending and descending order.”
I will find the quote and post it! From this, we can get a clear sense of the importance of transpersonal insight in the teachings.
Thankyou Dan, for your last comment. It helped a great deal in clearing away a misunderstanding of the meaning of not-self in a Jhanic context.
“Ananda, as long as I had not attained & emerged from these nine step-by-step dwelling-attainments in forward & backward order in this way, I did not claim to have directly awakened to the right self-awakening.” - AN9.41
*Phalasamapatti is attained by each of the four kinds of noble beings just after attaining the knowledge of the path, and it can be cultivated and extended by them as well. Nirodhasamapatti however, can only be entered by non-returners and arahats.
2 Likes
Not agitated just disappointed - my expectations of my fellow practitioners is to high - at least in this context. I need more compassion instead of astonishment and disbelief. I will work on it - thanks for the heart-felt concern! 
1 Like
I have added an important Sutta quotation - at the top and near the bottom of the thread. I hope the lights go on!
1 Like