interesting article on process of awakening

@Chris: None of this drivel about you being not smart enough to explain something!

@Ona: Love the bit about smashing someone's head with Augustine. I've always teared up when I get to the place about Monica's death. But many readers find him and his confessions to be insufferable.

I will put Jeffrey's dissertation on my to-do list. Right now I'm actually getting some grading done and I don't want to ruin the momentum.

I love some of his writing, but when I read his Confessions I mostly wanted to buy him a glass of wine and tell him to calm down.

Chris Marti wrote: Can we talk about the finding that Jeffery is getting at? He's apparently finding that persistent non-symbolic consciousness (awakening, I suppose) is not very highly correlated with ethical development. Anyone surprised by that? It would seen to contradict the "fetters" models.

So have we addressed this? My thought being that those who are inclined to ethical development will manifest that whether they are awake(ning) or not. Since some models (most?) are based on the methods/results of a specific system that can be somewhat self-fulfilling, in that people who can't stand or can't participate successfully within the system (ie follow the precepts and carry out the practices as instructed) will not join or will drop out, thus those who remain will largely meet expectations. ??

Plus reduction in identification with ego reduces the inclination to be unethical, although it's not foolproof. Sounds good to me.

Meaning identification with the illusion of the separate self is the basis for desire, aversion, and delusion, and our immoral behavior follows from that. A shortcut through dependent origination; hope I'm not bungling it too much.

Chris Marti wrote: doesn't actually create an ethical and moral orientation that was not already present (Jeffery Martin thesis)

I'll eventually read the 200 pages... but a quick question: how was ethics/morals assessed? Self reporting or measurement or interviewer opinion?

I think Laurel is on to something (and I realize we are just speculating and cocktail-conversing here, not doing hard science). The thing is unethical stuff is complex to the max. Let's take something simple: speaking ill of other people. This one is so common most of us do it all day long and don't even care unless someone says something bad about us, and then we feel hurt. But we are happy to pile on to talking badly about others even though we know how it feels. Even if we decide it's not nice to talk badly about others if they are people who might find out, that's just a way of avoiding them getting mad at us. We still are happy to say horrible things about people we don't know personally (say, the Kardashians, or rednecks, or Obama, or whatever).

So this behavior we might do:
-to fit in with others who are doing it around us (fear of being abandoned/social ostracism)
-to verbally strike the other person when we fear them or were hurt by them (defense/attack)
-to put them down so we feel superior (fear of weakness/insecurities about who we are)

In the above scenarios, being less invested in taking things personally (ie less 'ego' stuff) will probably reduce all three reasons for that behavior; in addition seeing how and why our urge to react in those ways is constructed (the growing self-awareness that often comes with spiritual development/maturity) will also reduce our reactivity. I suspect the latter does not always develop as well as the former - self-awareness or emotional maturity can be stunted, so to speak, in some people, and even if they wake up (in the process sense) that aspect remains underdeveloped. I have seen people in which it goes from not really being there to really being beautifully developed; but I've seen some people who have insights into the nature of reality but really have no visible self-awareness or emotional maturity at all, even years after fairly significant insights that I expected would open that up.

So one could say:

High Emotional Maturity + Deep Awakening = our expectations of enlightened people
Latent/Undeveloped Emotional Maturity + Deep Awakening = High Emotional Maturity develops eventually, meets our expectations eventually, but can take a while
Badly Broken Emotional Maturity + Deep Awakening = bad gurus, enlightened assholes, and people who just don't ever meet our expectations

??
Studies on that process would be interesting.

Got it:

The Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT)
(Loevinger, 1976; Cook-Greuter, 2000) and Mysticism Scale (Hood, 1975) were
administered to 36 participants (F = 9, M = 27) who self-reported persistent nonsymbolic
experience. The WUSCT was used to measure participants’ ego
development level.
...
The Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT). The
Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT) is a well-known and
robust semiprojective instrument that measures a cognitive development construct
referred to as “ego development.”
...
The WUSCT is comprised of 36 sentence stems that a participant must
complete, such as: “What gets me into trouble is” (Loevinger, 1976). The
structure of the instrument is designed to elicit participants ontological,
teleological, and epistemological perspectives. The instrument is based on the
theory that the way individuals codify meaning via the symbolic medium of
language can unconsciously reflect their self-concept, worldview, concept of
other, and preoccupations (Miller & Cook-Greuter, 1994).


I'll just say that, in general, I distrust self-reporting. If something needs to be measured, it should actually be measured. Too often investigators rely on self reporting out of expediency. It does generate enough data to derive statistical significance --- but results are only as good as the data. What winds up being developed are general coorelations that probably reflect a culture or sub-culture's language, not necessarily externally observed reality. I think this is the main thing that has to change in social science.

So within a statistically significant but potentially flawed methodology, it appears that the perceptual conditions catalysed (?) by PNSE’s may lead to moral and ethical positions that are considered by the cultural norms (in context of the sampled cultures) to be ‘greater’ or ‘better’.

Within this, to me It suggests that the fetters are potentially just that, and an awakened state (possibly in degrees based on the ‘locations’ described in the study) is one where among other things, the person is less motivated and less likely to play out from thoughts to feelings into action (presumably from perception of separateness as their root) that would be considered immoral.

So if this was the case (just riffing of it), it suggests the fetter model is indicative rather than set hard, evidenced in its degrees by ever more subtle and pervasive examples of the disconnect between perception of seperateness and resultant actions/behaviours in a person, or indeed the presence of any perception of separateness at all – heading down the dependent origination road now. So, hope I am not saying the obvious here but could the fetter model really just be pointing to the degree of that disconnect achieved at different stages on the Buddhist path model and using the potential for certain unethical/moral behaviours as a means or a tag to describe a baseline of disconnect in a person? Not sure I have described this well here.

This seems to make more sense than absolute inability to demonstrate behaviours associated with a particular fetter once it is eliminated. Although if you get far enough into Location 4 ...or beyond..for example maybe the fetters become very absolute!
But for us mortals, in summary YMMV!

Rod wrote: ...
So if this was the case (just riffing of it), it suggests the fetter model is indicative rather than set hard, evidenced in its degrees by ever more subtle and pervasive examples of the disconnect between perception of seperateness and resultant actions/behaviours in a person, or indeed the presence of any perception of separateness at all – heading down the dependent origination road now. So, hope I am not saying the obvious here but could the fetter model really just be pointing to the degree of that disconnect achieved at different stages on the Buddhist path model and using the potential for certain unethical/moral behaviours as a means or a tag to describe a baseline of disconnect in a person? Not sure I have described this well here.

This seems to make more sense than absolute inability to demonstrate behaviours associated with a particular fetter once it is eliminated. Although if you get far enough into Location 4 ...or beyond..for example maybe the fetters become very absolute!
But for us mortals, in summary YMMV!

That was more or less what I was thinking.

Look at p137 text/ 150 pdf: Notice that the measure really isn't ethics or morality either, but rather "ego development". So one could be a evil magician, yet "unitive"

e.g.:

The Unitive person no longer feels a need
to reach after fact and reason. "Objective" self-knowledge no
longer satisfies the need for constancy as it does for the highest
stages in Loevinger's theory. Instead, unfiltered experience or the
perception of ongoing process, rhythm and flux provide inner
stability and affirmation.
The self-sense of the Unitive stag is fluid, "undulating," based
on people's trust in the intrinsic value and processes of life. For
those at the Unitive stage, one can truly speak of a different,
higher stage integration according to the axioms of cognitivedevelopmental
theory . . .
Individuals see through the function of the ego to objectify and
reify the self by defining (delimiting) it. They experience the self
in its moment to moment transformation and therefore consciously
decline to satisfy the implicit demand for objective selfidentification.
They understand that the striving for individual
permanence is an impossible and unnecessary dream in the face of
their experience of the continuous change in states of awareness
They also see the ego with its striving for independence and for
permanent, objective identity as just one way among others of how
one is conscious of being. Thus, the symbolic, representational self
has been deconstructed and given way to a whole new mode of
perception . . .
Their openness to ongoing experience combined with a
conscious refusal to reify and codify experience makes this stage
fundamentally and structurally different from all previous ego
stages. In addition, people with a fluid, transcendent
self-sense seem to be free from the anxiety accompanying "notknowing"
that characterizes all earlier ego stages. Consciousness
or rational awareness is no longer perceived as a shackle, but as
just another phenomenon that assumes foreground or background
status depending on one's momentary focus . . .

that's wordy. chris, we need a brief restatement in five words or less!

One of the things I think we're picking up here but haven't quite mentioned explicitly is that any definition of 'ethical behaviour' is highly subjective. This will be true not only of individuals, but also of different spiritual traditions (e.g. what the tradition 'expects' a holy or awakened person to be in terms of ethics). There is also the disjunct between describing unethical behaviour (on which you can often get broad general agreement), and the understanding of what that means in action (on which that agreement is far rarer).

every3rdthought wrote: One of the things I think we're picking up here but haven't quite mentioned explicitly is that any definition of 'ethical behaviour' is highly subjective. This will be true not only of individuals, but also of different spiritual traditions (e.g. what the tradition 'expects' a holy or awakened person to be in terms of ethics). There is also the disjunct between describing unethical behaviour (on which you can often get broad general agreement), and the understanding of what that means in action (on which that agreement is far rarer).

That's where I thought Rod was getting somewhere - that any given list of "how enlightened people should behave" involves the expression of culturally relevant behaviors that are typically impacted by loss of self-involvement. "Culturally relevant" is more specific than just "Indian" or "Buddhist" - it has to take into account the specific lineage, monasticism etc. So the "ethical behavior" one could measure in Theravada monks would be different than in Shinto priests or Sufis from Morocco.

So it's less about what the rules are, but more about whether those rules express things which are likely to change due to loss of self-stuff (for people in that group).

Chris Marti wrote: Ona, about Jeffery Martin --

I love some of his writing, but when I read his Confessions I mostly wanted to buy him a glass of wine and tell him to calm down.

During the interview for his study, at a local restaurant, we stayed too long and his car was towed away. That's when you should have been there to tell him to calm down.

Forthcoming study: "Does awakening reduce people's susceptibility to having their car towed away?"

That's the 11th fetter.

Ona Kiser wrote: That's the 11th fetter.

-- "the Denver Boot"? of fetters

Okay, got another angle here: an old friend of mine is now in assisted living, and turns out she has a condition called frontal lobe dementia. So I googled it, and it's not Alzheimer's because memory is not affected so much as a sense of what is socially appropriate. People with this condition feel no embarrassment. As someone highly susceptible to embarrassment, I was interested in the Wikipedia article's point that embarrassment is a feeling that helps us be socially adaptive. I had never thought of embarrassment as anything other than a neurotic form of self-hatred or shame.

It seems to me that when shame and embarrassment (not necessarily the same thing, but I can't parse that at the moment) become ramped up past a point of functionality the person suffers. But when it isn't present, the person has no barrier to certain kinds of bad behavior. So: when we disembed from identification with experience and with the solid ego illusion, we are less likely to feel these things. Yet something else has to take their place, or else we'd be doing all sorts of stupid things.

Which brings me to something Jack Kornfield said about lots of monks who are undersocialized: if they are awake, but don't know the rules, are they (anyone now, not just people from other cultures) more apt to have trouble being functional in society? Which might translate in some cases into unethical behavior?

or just quirky or eccentric behavior.