Part 1/4
On May 22, 2024, shortly before Richard’s death, Daniel Ingram reached out to me indicating that a friend of his thought Richard should be interviewed for the “Expert Opinion Project” (link) of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC) (link)[1].
{Addendum May 12, 2025: an exchange I had with Daniel ~2 years prior to this one may be informative as well: Thread 2.}
The resultant exchange, particularly my last message, is elucidative of the fundamental differences between modern-day buddhistic meditative/spiritual practices, genuine spiritual Enlightenment (as depicted in the buddhavacana, the Word of the Buddha), and actualism and actual freedom, and as such I thought it would be of benefit to re-present it on the forum here (with permission).
First, some context – as the EPRC’s mission is to “to conduct studies on emergent practices and phenomena”, where “emergent practices” are defined as “practices designed to lead to emergent phenomena, such as meditation, psychedelics, yoga, prayer, etc.” (source) – what do they mean, precisely, by the term “emergent phenomena”?
They define it in their whitepaper:
They offer a broad range of categories that most of the phenomena they are interested in studying fit into at least one of: “sensate” [2], “perceptual” [3], “arousal-related” [4], “temporal” [5], “sequential” [6], “spacial” [7], “dimensional” [8], “contextual” [9], “existential” [10], “psychological” [11], “emotional” [12], “volitional” [13], “archetypal” [14], “semantic” [15], “interpretive” [16], “informational” [17], “valence” [18], “envelope” [19], “cognitive” [20], “physiological” [21], “paradigmatic” [22], “kinetic” [23], “vocational” [24], “functional” [25], “behavioral” [26], “social” [27], “collective effects” [28], “cultural” [29], “expressive” [30], “medical” [31], “energetic” [32], “magical (psi)” [33], and “meta-emergent” [34]
They unambiguously include Enlightenment (including as depicted in the buddhavacana) under this broad umbrella:
As Daniel Ingram was e-mailing to inquire about Richard being interviewed for one of the EPRC’s projects, they clearly include actual freedom under the broad umbrella of “emergent phenomena”.
With that context established, we can continue with the exchange. I e-mailed Daniel the following from Vineeto in reply:
Daniel’s response was:
I thought it best to gather more information first so as to make it as successful a re-iteration of the invitation as possible, so I replied with:
Daniel’s response:
I attempted to vigorously engage Daniel with the following, as I thought it the best chance to break through if possible:
His response indicated that the attempt was unsuccessful:
My last response before forwarding this all to Vineeto was:
- ↩︎
“unusual sensate effects and experiences, typically visual, auditory, and somatic, but also olfactory, gustatory, vestibular, and proprioceptive” ↩︎
“alterations in the quality, capability, phase, apparent sampling rate, scope, and shape of perception and attention” ↩︎
“alterations in the quality, mode, and level of arousal itself, including experiences on the borders of sleep and waking (e.g. hypnogogic experiences), as well as what may happen in various forms of sleep, including in dreams and deep sleep, such as lucid dreams and lucid deep sleep, as well as some of the parasomnias” ↩︎
“alterations in the perception of and understanding of time, including time seeming to speed up, slow down, stop, go backwards, loop, split, be lost, cease to apply as a construct altogether, or to have some sort of access to the past, future, or alternative time lines, including such concepts as retrocausality” ↩︎
“related to the temporal order in which these emergent effects and experiences generally appear” ↩︎
“related to emergent phenomena doing something to space itself, changing it, adding something emergent to it, etc.” ↩︎
“related to the sense of there being spaces and directions beyond ordinary 3+1 dimensional space-time, compression of dimensions to less than than 3+1 dimensions, as well as bending of them, creating other alterations of them, as well as other non-local effects” ↩︎
“related to the contexts in which the other emergent experiences and effects may be more or less likely to occur, as well as the effect of contexts (situational, cultural, physical, etc.) on the other phenomena” ↩︎
“alterations in our understanding of deep and layered aspects of existence and identity itself, including to our sense of agency, subjectivity, the centrality and coherence of identity, the continuity or ephemerality of experience, life before or after death, parallel lives, split existences, and the like” ↩︎
“alterations, both good and bad, in the presentation, intensity, and relationship to our issues, as well as various presentations that can resemble and may sometimes appear to overlap with various mental illnesses as well as the wellness-related goals of positive psychology” ↩︎
“elevations, depressions, and alterations of mood, often seemingly unrelated or only loosely related to current circumstances” ↩︎
“related to changes in our sense of control and agency, such as strengthening it, reducing it, eliminating it, transcending it, seeing through some sense of an illusion of it, being controlled by other people or entities, and other alterations” ↩︎
“experiences of and alterations in relationship to “archetypes” in the psychological, Jungian sense” ↩︎
“alterations in relationship to the meanings of words, concepts, and experiences” ↩︎
“impacting the way that particular experiences and events are interpreted, or the way reality itself is interpreted” ↩︎
“related to receiving various forms of information, such as “downloads”, channeling, precognition (which obviously contains a temporal component as well), and encompassing phenomena such as Third Man Factor” ↩︎
“in the sense meant by psychology, meaning alterations in the degree to which an experience is perceived as pleasant/good, unpleasant/bad, or neutral, which may have a direct impact on our perceived quality of life” ↩︎
“a term borrowed from music and relating to alterations in the apparent duration of the attack, sustain, decay, and release of sensations, emotions, psychological issues, mind states, and other qualities of experience, including other emergent phenomena” ↩︎
“alterations in our processing abilities and the quality of cognition itself” ↩︎
“alterations of our material bodies and their quality and function, body temperature, heart rate and its variability, respiration, sleep, energy level in the ordinary sense, and measurable changes on EEG, MEG, fMRI, and other neuroimaging and measurement devices” ↩︎
“alterations in the way we fundamentally conceive of and relate to many aspects of experience and the world, which may include alterations to our understanding of and relationship to philosophy, ontology, epistemology, how things truly work, and nosology” ↩︎
“effects on the movement of the body, such as it seeming to freeze, become more or less coordinated, or move spontaneously in patterns, or apparently at random” ↩︎
“effects on our livelihoods, careers, education, and the like” ↩︎
“changes to our activities of daily living and basic ability to function in the ordinary world” ↩︎
“changes in personal behaviors” ↩︎
“changes in our relationships to others, society, and our roles in society” ↩︎
“changes that occur when groups gather together in emergent contexts, doing emergent practices, or when having emergent phenomena” ↩︎
“alterations in our relationship to our culture as well as those related to our primary culture and other cultures” ↩︎
“changes in how we communicate and express ourselves” ↩︎
“changes in our relationship to health, healing, the symptoms and trajectories of other medical conditions, including chronic pain or terminal conditions, and our overall sense of wellness or unwellness” ↩︎
“effects for which the word ‘energetic’, or ‘energy-like’, is probably the best word we have, even if we don’t yet entirely know what that is physiologically, and that involves experiences that may involve a sense of vibrations, power, movements, colors, sounds, and moods, changes in wakefulness and perception, often related to various ‘centers’ in the body” ↩︎
“a wide range of effects and experiences from which we might be tempted to infer something beyond ‘ordinary’ materialistic causality and a single, shared Euclidean space, and about which the EPRC will remain strictly ontologically agnostic while yet appreciating that reports of these sorts of effects and experiences may often have clinical relevance” ↩︎
*“Changes in the experience of, relationship to, and interpretation of other emergent phenomena, such as the sense of them being good or bad or mixed, of them occurring on their own or with a sense of control and even mastery, of them being harmful or healing, of them being real or unreal, of them being of social value or not, etc.” ↩︎
The Wikipedia provides an adequate definition of the “four paths”:
↩︎
. On hindsight, it would have been better to just go about living a normal life. Why would anyone want to go thru cycles and Dark Nights and all of that hell?
In fact whatever ‘emergent phenomena’ would only get in the way of this earthly perfection.