![](Pasted%20image%2020250330232346.png) --- Whenever we talk about Awakening we always run into what appear to be linguistic paradoxes between the “relative” and the “absolute”. So like, people say “you are already awake, there’s nothing to do, samsara is nirvana, etc” and yet talk about what will make you more awake, what will liberate you from suffering, etc. Different traditions have attempted to tackle this confusion, one of the most prominent being the “two truths” of Buddhism. But a ton of confusion remains, and often leads to elaborate philosophical disagreements that really stem from this muddiness. Here’s a way to explain the resolution: we’re talking about similar fractals on different layers of abstraction. So let’s say we draw a picture of a moon. Is this picture of the moon, a moon? It depends on the semantics of “moon”. Obviously in a certain sense, this picture is not the moon, and indeed has no more “raw” connection to the moon than any other random drawing. But in another sense, it is, and it would be perfectly fine English for someone to walk up to the picture and say “oh hey, it’s the moon!” The reason why we sometimes say the picture is a moon is that it has a (somewhat) similar underlying structure to the actual moon. It’s meant to be an approximation (though it doesn’t necessarily matter that it was “intended” as such), albeit transformed with various distortions (artistic license, 2D vs. 3D, etc). Or, let’s say we have a drawing on a 2D surface that is meant to look 3D, along with a caption that says “this drawing is 3D!” Is this a 3D drawing? Well, again, it depends on language. It’s an approximation of a 3D object, but it’s still on a 2D surface. From the “absolute” perspective, all the drawings on this 2D surface are equally 3D; it doesn’t matter whether it is trying to look otherwise. From the “relative” perspective, some drawings are “3D drawings” and others are “2D drawings”, and maybe some are ambiguous. We can describe this mathematically if we want, in terms of projecting a shape onto some N-dimensional surface, like a sphere onto a 2D plane. Or we can talk about it in the context of graph similarities and approximate isomorphisms, or whatever. So circling back to awakening, if there’s a conscious moment that seems to have a cluster of sensations acting like a deluded, suffering self that thinks it’s separate and unawakened, is this a suffering self or not? Depends on the framing! You can say it’s all already liberated, or you can say that it’s not liberated. If you say the latter you can then say that some conscious moments that have a better “approximation” of the Truth (™) are more awake than others. Note that this spectrum of how good the “approximation” is isn’t some separate experience or entity, just like how there isn’t some separate “thing” on the 2D painting for how 3D it looks. It’s just an abstract metric we’re giving it. What makes awakening particularly interesting is that in its most “absolute” layer, it’s “defined” such that it cannot actually be defined or pointed to at all. The Tao that can be talked about is not the Eternal Tao, after all. So in this sense, the neo-advaitans are literally correct when they say that everyone is already awake. But can awakening also be relative? Of course - we can define the word however we want after all. But any drawing of a moon cannot ever be the same as the actual moon, and so as soon as you attach a relative criteria to awakening, it’s going to be a little bit imperfect. Do you want the “relative criteria” to be super subtle to the point of being asymptotically close to the absolute, like some interpretations of Zen? Or do you want it to be on a very gross level like traditionalist Theravada? There’s not necessarily a “correct” answer, just maybe more or less coherent logical deductions that you then build from them. But it’s all free in the end! # Jhanic supplement Not exactly introductory but here's some supplemental instruction that assumes some prior knowledge of meditation and the basic definition of jhanas. The big secret to jhana, or at least less "hard" jhana, is that they're all very connected with insight. They don't just happen arbitrarily (well, except to the extent that everything can be said to happen arbitrarily blah blah), but rather there's a clear way in which their presence is connected with certain configurations of attention that represent various layers in which the mind fundamentally seeks liberation. Once you get enough immersion with the flavor of each jhana, you can call them up at will. Take the first jhana, for example. All you need for the first jhana is a source of joy that get amplified in a feedback loop. That source of joy is always available when you notice that the very phenomenological definition of joy is implied by every moment because attention is always going to be attracted somewhere / there's always a unification and so there must be joy somewhere (this abstraction doesn't have to be thought of every time, you can just look for a source of joy, however small, or generate one, by samatha or a happy memory or instinct or whatever). Then the feedback loop is just about putting attention on the joy, and naturally letting it explode exponentially which your mind will want to do by default. This process can cause hindrances to arise, but with practice you can learn how to deal with them (and if nothing else you have the opportunity to learn something about said hindrances). For example, I can get this OCD part constantly asking "is this jhana yet?" and icking out if it isn't satisfied, but then I realize that this icking is because it thinks that the "jhana" is some other mental object than the joy already in this moment (a bit hacky but I get around this by just telling myself that I'm not looking for jhana but just want to feel the joy). Anyway I can go into specific techniques for it which work for different people in different cases, but the broader idea is: you figure out that jhanas aren't like some unexplained thing that you might get lucky with, but rather you acquire faith that they're predictable ways that the mind moves towards wholesome states, and then you just experiment with how to set things up and then you realize you can do them regularly.