satori as a phase transition

I am a big fan of Absolute Idealism which basically posits that the mind mirrors the reality and the logic of the world is the same as the logic of the mind. (See Hegel.) The world is comprehensible because it too is a mind, and all minds are complex adaptive systems.

The hardest thing to understand is why we can understand anything at all.
- Albert Einstein

There are levels in understanding for the same reason why there are levels in any complex dynamics. Thoughts constitute a world onto themselves and transformative learning experiences create cascading effects that eventually reach to the core of what holds your belief system together. These irreversible experiences (which arise at the moments when you are transitioning to higher levels) are like big earthquakes. They are rare but easy to recognize. (When such earthquakes take place in the collective mind, we call them paradigm shifts.) In Buddhism, Satori is characterized as one such extreme peak experience.

Satori is the sudden flashing into consciousness of a new truth hitherto undreamed of. It is a sort of mental catastrophe taking place all at one, after much piling up of matters intellectual and demonstrative. The piling has reached a limit of stability and the whole edifice has come tumbling to the group, when, behold, a new heaven is open to full survey...

When a man's mind is matured for satori it tumbles over one everywhere. An articulate sound, an unintelligent remark, a blooming flower, or a trivial incident such as stumbling, is the condition or occasion that will open his mind to satori. Apparently, an insignificant event produces an effect which in importance is altogether out of proportion. The light touch of an igniting wire, and an explosion follows which will shake the very foundation of the earth. All the causes, all the conditions of satori are in the mind; they are merely waiting for the maturing. When the mind is ready for some reasons or others, a bird flies, or a bell rings, and you at once return to your original home; that is, you discover your now real self. From the very beginning nothing has been kept from you, all that you wished to see has been there all the time before you, it was only yourself that closed the eye to the fact. Therefore, there is in Zen nothing to explain, nothing to teach, that will add to your knowledge. Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only a borrowed plumage.

D. T. Suzuki - An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Pages 65)

The contrast between the cultivational mindset of the East and the transactional mindset of the West becomes very stark here. Satori is not a piece of information and enlightenment is not transferrable. This arises immediate jealousy and subsequent skepticism in most unenlightened Western minds. “What do you do different now?” they ask, as if it is possible to instantly reverse-engineer a self-organized criticality that took years of strenuous effort to build.

Transfer of wisdom requires preparedness. Transfer of information does not. (This is why education is so resistant to technological improvements.) Generally speaking, wiser the message, lower the probability of a successful transmission. You can not expect a student to make several jumps at once. True learning always happens one level at a time. Otherwise, internalization can not take place and what is “learned” starts to look more like a “borrowed plumage”.

Wisest thinkers are read the most but retained the least, because we all like taking short-cuts unless someone actively prevents us from doing so.

A good mentor both widens your horizon and restricts your reach. Today’s obsession with individual freedom is preventing parents from seeing the value of restriction in education. They want teachers to only widen horizons, but forget that unbalanced guidance can actually be worse than leaving the students alone and completely self-guided. In a completely free learning environment something magical starts happen: The right path to wisdom starts to self-assemble itself. What a good teacher does is to catalyze this natural self-assembly process. Wrong guidance, on the other hand, is too accelerative (or artificial) and result in the introduction of subjects (and authors) too early for successful retainment. It creates illusions of learning, and even worse turns students permanently away from certain subjects (and authors) because of misunderstandings or feelings of inadequacy.

Do you remember yourself absolutely falling in love with certain books and then falling out of love with them later on? This is a completely natural process. It actually means you are on the right path and making progress. In a sense, every non-fiction book is meant to be superseded, like small phase transitions. (Good fiction on the other hand can stay relevant for a long time.) This however does not mean that you should be less thankful to the authors of those books that you no longer enjoy. They were the necessary intermediary steps, and without them you would not be where you are here today. Of course, the journey looks nonlinear, funny and misguided in retrospect, but that is exactly how all natural journeys look like. Just observe how evolution reached to its current stage, how completely alien and unintuitive the microcosmos is!

And don’t forget, the future (in the world of both thoughts and things) always remains open and full of surprises. Learning is a never-ending process for us mortals. Enjoy it while it lasts.