Hyper-Sanity - Looking for a predictive model of Enlightenment

[Anton Rogachevski]

We usually think of sanity as binary, either on or off, at most maybe someone is more insane than the other, and never think about what is the positive aspect of gaining more sanity than normal, what we call in the spiritual sphere more enlightened or awoken. The ability to see reality as it is more accurately, to be even more sober than the norm. If this is true, then we can make a predictive model of enlightenment if we find ways to measure higher levels of sanity and so prove that sanity is central to the philosophical pursuit of the understanding of Metaphysics. We don't usually think of philosophy and psychology together but we should. We should first ask how sane and lucid the philosopher was when he declared his metaphysical statements, and even better to find a way to quantify and to measure his levels so we can know who to trust.

Update Edit:

I'm building a list of the required components of Hyper Sanity, what else do you think comprises this meta structure?

• High Awareness
• Paradigm awareness
• Lack of attachment
• Open mindedness
• Epistemic Humility

Edited 8 minutes ago by Anton Rogachevski

[Breakingthewall]

Agree with that. To begin serious spiritual work, you need to be consistent, focused, and have great clarity in your worldly life. But usually, the opposite happens: since your worldly life is a mess, you throw yourself into spirituality, and then, well, you know how it goes.

[Anton Rogachevski]

@Breakingthewall
People naively believe spiritual ideas, doing spiritual bypass instead of actual personal development, and get stuck in armchair philosophy thinking they are clever.

[Breakingthewall]

11 minutes ago, Anton Rogachevski said:

@Breakingthewall
People naively believe spiritual ideas, doing spiritual bypass instead of actual personal development, and get stuck in armchair philosophy thinking they are clever.

Yes, People turn to spirituality because things have been difficult for them; they haven't been able to adapt, succeed in relationships and careers, they're depressed, and they see spirituality and enlightenment as a way to overcome all that with an affordable work. Then they convince themselves that they are consciousness ,enlightened, whatever that implies "better than the normies", and thus their ego is at ease.

Edited 21 hours ago by Breakingthewall

[LastThursday]

That begs the question: what is sanity?

[Anton Rogachevski]

14 hours ago, LastThursday said:

That begs the question: what is sanity?

Wise of you to play the skeptic. I define it as the ability to perceive reality in the most accurate way. So losing sanity means losing touch with reality, and being sane means staying in as much contact with reality as possible. Check out my journal here in the signature for the two essays delineating my epistemic approach in great detail.

Edited 5 hours ago by Anton Rogachevski

[LastThursday]

I'll continue in sceptic mode: how would one know how accurately one is perceiving reality? If people can become insane isn't that evidence that it's not possible to know if you're insane or not?

[Anton Rogachevski]

12 minutes ago, LastThursday said:

I'll continue in sceptic mode: how would one know how accurately one is perceiving reality? If people can become insane isn't that evidence that it's not possible to know if you're insane or not?

I'm not offering answers but asking questions. I would love to know how to assess sanity and how to measure it correctly. I'm sure that we can find a very wise psychiatrist or a psychologist that can make a specialized quiz for this. 

Edited 19 hours ago by Anton Rogachevski

[LastThursday]

Fair enough.

[gettoefl]

3 hours ago, Anton Rogachevski said:

I'm not offering answers but asking questions. I would love to know how to assess sanity and how to measure it correctly. I'm sure that we can find a very wise psychiatrist or a psychologist that can make a specialized quiz for this. 

I think you’re pointing at something important, but I frame it a bit differently.

What we usually call “sanity” is already defined inside a massively distorted framework. By that measure, most people agree with one another and function, but that doesn’t mean they’re close to seeing reality clearly. In that sense, what passes for normal is already deeply muddled. Indeed, the world we collectively navigate is unstable, contradictory, and oriented around threat, competition, and death; and we take all this as given rather than questionable.

Sanity, as you suggest, really is about seeing reality accurately. But I'd say it doesn't come in degrees the way intelligence or emotional regulation does. It’s not a matter of being more or less sane than the average. It’s a radical shift in orientation: either perception is filtered through fear, defense, and assumption, or it isn’t. Mixing clarity and distortion cannot produce partial truth; it just produces similar distortion that feels a bit convincing.

That’s why I don’t think sanity is something that can be meaningfully quantified or measured on a continuum. Any measurement system is itself being built from the same assumptions it’s trying to evaluate! The problem isn’t lack of data; the issue is the lens through which data is interpreted.

What is required then is willingness, which means a readiness to question one’s own interpretations rather than reinforce them, and to allow a different way of seeing to replace the familiar one. That shift doesn’t add information; it removes interference. And when that happens, clarity will not be incremental; rather it is immediate!

So I agree that sanity is central to metaphysics, but I’d say it’s less about ranking minds and more about whether the mind is defending its story or willing to let it all go.

 

[Anton Rogachevski]

@gettoefl

I do envision a continuum of sanity where you can see more and more clearly through illusion and to stay in a non dual state for longer. Of course there are degrees of enlightenment, and many aspects of truth to be revealed. It's not so binary and simple as you are trying to make it.

Let's just try to stay open minded about it, and not just say "it's impossible" which is an unfalsifiable claim.

We will surely have to redefine what we mean by "sane", making a new paradigm that shows that sanity is not so simple and normal as we thought.

Edited 5 hours ago by Anton Rogachevski

[gettoefl]

4 minutes ago, Anton Rogachevski said:

@gettoefl

I do envision a continuum of sanity where you can see more and more clearly through illusion and to stay in a non dual state for longer. Of course there are degrees of enlightenment, and many aspects of truth to be revealed. It's not so binary and simply as you are trying to make it.

What you’re describing is clarity within a unreal framework, not sanity itself.

Seeing more clearly through illusion is still seeing illusion. Staying longer in a non-dual state within experience is still a state, and states come and go. You’re describing refinement of perception inside a hallucination, not the end of mistaking it for reality.

Sanity can't be a continuum within insanity. That will be like saying there are degrees of sobriety while still drunk. You can be less confused, more functional, more insightful etc. but as long as perception is still structured around presumed separation, vulnerability, and time, the underlying premise hasn’t changed.

What does admit degrees is stability in clarity, but not clarity itself. The recognition of truth is wholly binary: either the false premise is operating or it isn’t. What varies is how consistently that recognition is not interfered with afterward.

So yes, there can be many experiences, insights, and refinements, but sanity itself is nothing to do with progressive accumulation. It’s the absence of an underlying mistake. Don’t approach it asymptotically; you either stop making the same error, or you don’t.

Sanity within insanity is still insanity, just better lit.

[Anton Rogachevski]

@gettoefl

One cannot talk about clarity as separate from sanity. can one have clarity within insanity or sanity and a lack of clarity? sounds like clarity would be an important part of sanity. 

Your definition of sanity is too far from the usual way it's used, you are moving the goal post too far, and basically saying that it's a quantum leap into sanity. Basically you say it's a miracle, because one insane person somehow stumbles into sanity by mistake. There is a process and there is a degree of increasing sanity in the very process of getting there.

Edited 15 hours ago by Anton Rogachevski

[Breakingthewall]

5 hours ago, LastThursday said:

I'll continue in sceptic mode: how would one know how accurately one is perceiving reality? If people can become insane isn't that evidence that it's not possible to know if you're insane or not?

Going crazy is basically lying to yourself to adapt reality to your emotional needs. At a high degree, you're schizophrenic; at a lower degree, you're like most people.

Sanity is eliminating your emotional need of the equation, which clouds your vision, thus restoring clarity.

[gettoefl]

1 hour ago, Anton Rogachevski said:

@gettoefl

One cannot talk about clarity as separate from sanity. can one have clarity within insanity or sanity and a lack of clarity? sounds like clarity would be an important part of sanity. 

Your definition of sanity is too far from the usual way it's used, you are moving the goal post too far, and basically saying that it's a quantum leap into sanity. Basically you say it's a miracle, because one insane person somehow stumbles into sanity by mistake. There is a process and there is a degree of increasing sanity in the very process of getting there.

I agree that clarity and sanity are inseparable but that’s exactly the point where right now we’re diverging.

The disagreement isn’t about whether clarity matters. It’s about what clarity is clarity of.

There is certainly a kind of clarity that operates within the relative framework: sharper concepts, fewer contradictions, better self-regulation, longer access to certain states, more coherence of experience. That kind of clarity absolutely admits degrees, development, and process and both of us agree that it’s valuable. Psychology, philosophy, and contemplative practice all work effectively.

But that is not the same thing as clarity about the framework itself.

You can be abundantly clear, coherent, and refined while still taking a false premise as an assumption. In that case, clarity comes across as real, but it’s clarity in service of error. That’s what I mean when I say clarity within insanity. The mind is functioning well, but it’s functioning inside an assumption that’s never been held up to scrutiny.

When I say sanity is binary, I do not mean that people “randomly stumble into it by mistake,” nor that there’s not a process. The process is very real but what that process does is remove interference, not gradually construct sanity. Sanity isn’t built up; it’s unveiled. And unveiling something is far different from refining something.

Think of it this way: You can progressively clean a window, right? That’s a process with degrees. But the moment you see through it rather than at the dirt, that shift itself isn’t gradual right? What is gradual is how consistently you stop smudging it again.

So yes: 1. There is a process. 2. There are degrees of stability, integration, and embodiment. 3. There are many partial clarities along the way.

But the core correction - seeing that the starting idea was wrong - is not a matter of degree. You either continue to assume it, or you don’t. That’s the binary that I’m pointing to.

So I’m by no means moving goalposts; I’m distinguishing refinement within a model from recognition that the model itself was was based on a house of cards. The first scales while the second doesn't.

That’s not a miracle in the sense of randomness. It's simply what happens when the idea of a separated universe is no longer defended.

Edited 14 hours ago by gettoefl

[Cred]

I would define insanity like this:

"Person is insane" is true if and only if they are far away from the norm and have resulting identity problems with it.

Sane is not somebody who is logical or something, but simply someone who is not insane. That's it.

"not being able to differentiate", "not being able to apply logic", "not being able to pick up on social cues", "only living in anticipation", "not being able to be disciplined" make you drift away from the norm, but they don't make you insane. 

If you develop so much insecurity around it that your Self collapses in on itself, then and only then you have insanity.

This means that Hyper sanity does not mean that someone is a super genius scientist, rather it would be someone who has 100% self-acceptance regardless of "ability".

Edited 11 hours ago by Cred

[Anton Rogachevski]

8 hours ago, gettoefl said:

I agree that clarity and sanity are inseparable but that’s exactly the point where right now we’re diverging.

The disagreement isn’t about whether clarity matters. It’s about what clarity is clarity of.

There is certainly a kind of clarity that operates within the relative framework: sharper concepts, fewer contradictions, better self-regulation, longer access to certain states, more coherence of experience. That kind of clarity absolutely admits degrees, development, and process and both of us agree that it’s valuable. Psychology, philosophy, and contemplative practice all work effectively.

But that is not the same thing as clarity about the framework itself.

You can be abundantly clear, coherent, and refined while still taking a false premise as an assumption. In that case, clarity comes across as real, but it’s clarity in service of error. That’s what I mean when I say clarity within insanity. The mind is functioning well, but it’s functioning inside an assumption that’s never been held up to scrutiny.

When I say sanity is binary, I do not mean that people “randomly stumble into it by mistake,” nor that there’s not a process. The process is very real but what that process does is remove interference, not gradually construct sanity. Sanity isn’t built up; it’s unveiled. And unveiling something is far different from refining something.

Think of it this way: You can progressively clean a window, right? That’s a process with degrees. But the moment you see through it rather than at the dirt, that shift itself isn’t gradual right? What is gradual is how consistently you stop smudging it again.

So yes: 1. There is a process. 2. There are degrees of stability, integration, and embodiment. 3. There are many partial clarities along the way.

But the core correction - seeing that the starting idea was wrong - is not a matter of degree. You either continue to assume it, or you don’t. That’s the binary that I’m pointing to.

So I’m by no means moving goalposts; I’m distinguishing refinement within a model from recognition that the model itself was was based on a house of cards. The first scales while the second doesn't.

That’s not a miracle in the sense of randomness. It's simply what happens when the idea of a separated universe is no longer defended.

Ok I agree this is powerful. So by your definition sanity is seeing through false assumptions. It's also a good way of putting it.

Just think for a second, there are no "real" or "unreal" paradigms, they are just that - a paradigm, and no paradigm can be the Truth.

Enlightenment is post-paradigm, it's not within any framework.

Edited 5 hours ago by Anton Rogachevski

[Anton Rogachevski]

@Cred

A very interesting approach. Of course we can't use the old definitions the same way to work with something so extraordinary. We need to redefine.

Edited 5 hours ago by Anton Rogachevski

[Ramasta9]

What is it to truly be sane and sober? To rise to the level to see reality for what it is, to see with true sight, to no longer dream or hallucinate.

The Master is Aware, he no longer trips or hallucinates, for Awareness supersedes the mind.

[Anton Rogachevski]

@Ramasta9

The Hyper-Sane is aware of himself and all the "world" as pure hallucination. This is the phenomenological truth of seeing things from an enlightened perspective, but in my dual-epistemic view I still hold that there is something beyond the veil and that is the real Truth, and I am that which I will never have access to, but can only see from within as phenomenon. I can't know it, but I don't need to, I am already it. It's enough for me.

Edited 5 hours ago by Anton Rogachevski