You want me start my journey towards "enlightenment" or would you elaborate why you mean by what you quoted?

A journeyman is someone who has acquired all the micro-skills they were missing, and has thus gone on to achieve some level of intuitive grasp of the enlightenment they sought. They "grok" the skill.

A master is someone who has gone back and thoroughly weeded their mental garden of the micro-skills they started with and took for granted, and have begun (though perhaps not finished) replacing those with conscious learnings. The master desires to attain conscious handles onto each and every part of the mental schema or process they seek to understand, in order to understand the enlightenment-requiring mental skill as a system, rather than as a simple intuition.

A journeyman has a sense that they know the answer—that they "are enlightened"—and this sense works well enough to guide them when they seek to use the mental skill they sought to acquire. But, because they do not understand the enlightenment-requiring mental skill as a system, only as an intuition, they can give an apprentice on the path no answer that will satisfy them. This is the "gallows humour" stage of the path.

Yes, masters of the path will be able to guide apprentices. Zen koans are written by masters, and they are no gallows humour; they tilt the world enough to allow you to catch sight of the micro-skills the master was attempting to convey. (In the modern world of analytic philosophy, koans might even have a hope of being displaced by jargon-laden explanations that can be drudged through to bash the concept into one's head, like a maths textbook. That doesn't sound exciting, but it is!)

Light Table is such a koan, created by a master of the path of living-memory-image reflective systems, seeking to "tilt" as many parts of the system that Smalltalk is into the light as possible. (Granger's trick was contrasting those parts to a backdrop of regular, ugly concepts like Javascript and Electron that aren't part of the enlightenment-inspiring system. The concept-handles come clear at the visible seams of the Light Table system. Whereas, in Smalltalk itself, the seams aren't visible, because the system is coherent. You can't see the muscles of the perfect average face; it's too coherent to dissect.)

Putting this another way: most people who might be asked about something aren't teachers with education degrees. They're just students who already learned something and want to share what they learned. They fail because the thing is hard to share, and they don't have the skills about teaching required to realize what's making the thing hard to share and to fix it. (Those that do have such skills, but don't have the time to apply them to the concept—dissecting it and re-building it in a teachable-to-others form—usually just keep silent, rather than attempting to share their learning.)

> Haskell['s journeymen] are such failures [to teach the required micro-skills] even in the face of an audience who has previously undergone such a paradigm shift.

Ah, but have they? Many people have a natural mind for software engineering. They take for granted the concepts inherent in procedural code execution on a CPU or virtual machine; in parsing and lexing; even in pseudo-paradigms like OOP.

Indeed, it is the rare software engineer who actually experienced any paradigm shifts regarding Computer Science (for those of us that took a degree in it.) Usually it's "easy"—meaning natural—for those of an analytical mindset.

All, perhaps, except for that one class you have to take at the beginning of a CS curriculum, Discrete Maths. A lot of the SwEng "naturals" struggle at that. Because Discrete Maths is not the same thing as CS. Discrete Maths is, in fact, maths.

Mathematicians are used to paradigm shifts/"englightenments" (i.e. learning systematic skills requiring working knowledge of many micro-skills). Each subfield of mathematics is essentially named for the systematic skill required to comprehend work done under its aegis. Mathematicians who read work in various sub-fields, are used to quickly achieving a journeyman's competence in the relevant systematic skills. Mathematicians who specialize, who enter a sub-field, must necessarily become masters, if they have any hope of building upon that work. They must understand the required skill fully. (They must, by cute analogy, be able to build their Light-sabers from scratch.)

Most software engineers—including Haskellers—are not mathematicians. They have, other than that one time in Discrete Maths, never experienced the feeling of climbing toward an enlightenment. Even then, Discrete Maths is often the lowest grade for a lot of new CS students. They don't yet have this meta-skill of climbing toward enlightenments—of throwing themselves hard at formalized jargon using textbooks and references in an attempt to build a new systematic schema in their brain in just a few days. And they are almost never told that this is the true skill that their Discrete Maths course is there to impart into them. It's not about learning graph theory or whatever; that, just as much as a class on Operating Systems or VLSI or whatever else, is a practical, concrete skill for a software engineer. The Discrete Maths class in a CS program is about learning how to quickly learn those kinds of concepts. It's about discovering that these mental gulfs exist, and learning the skills required to cross one.

If only it was taught as such ;)

The reason Haskell is uniquely bad, here, is that Haskell was—perhaps problematically—constructed by mathematicians, people who had already crossed one such gulf. Haskell's design and ecosystem "reflects" enlightenment on category theory, somewhat like Smalltalk "reflects" enlightenment on living-memory-image OOP. Neither system teaches those skills, though. You don't need to cross the gulf of category-theory to intuit Haskell as a journeyman; you only do if you want to have the appreciation for the "coherent shape" of Haskell required to make coherence-preserving modifications to its feature-set.

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The long and short of the way to communicate all the Haskell "stuff" efficiently, not just monads, is to:

1. give the learner the meta-skill of Being A Student Of Mathematics (i.e. becoming a journeyman in new systematic skills by poring over textbooks and doing problems);

2. throw a Category Theory textbook at the learner, who is now equipped to digest it.

Anything less is laziness—though not necessarily on the part of the teacher ;)

The more interesting question is, why are you trying to attain it? What is it that makes people seek enlightenment?

A path to enlightenment.

I've read a lot on these subjects already, but I am certainly saving this for two reasons:

* Including papers and sections of books in my weekly reading

* I find it quicker to understand if I can grab a handful of explanations and critique them (often rewriting the confusing parts of several explanations once understood)

If you want an easy list, or a minimal list, this isn't it - and I am glad.

* What is truth?

* What is happiness and what is peace? How to get them?

* What is Enlightenment?

* How to recognize an Enlightened being?

* What is nirvana?

* What is eternal life and how to get it? How to save one's life? How to save the world?

* What is destiny?

* What is reality?

* What is life and how does it work?

* What is good teaching and what is bad teaching?

* How to tell the future? How to see the present? How to derive correct information from records of the past?

* How does the energy in the human body work and by what details in what process does a consciousness exist and drive a human body?

* What does the term god mean and what's the relationship (if any) between gods and human beings?

* What is gravity, how is it formed/generated? What is the relationship between gravity and other fields? What is space-time made out of?

* How did the third eye form?

* How to live well?

* What is leadership?

I actually had lots of questions, and it's not only his answers that convinced me but his dedication despite the hardships he endured carrying out his mission

Exactly as in any other field of expertise. Through your practice, knowledge/experiences you gain from that practice. Mere reading the books doesn't take one far in any field.

> Secondly, let's say it's all true. Why is that so desirable?

Who says it's desirable to everyone? It's individual's choice. If you get pleasure in learning something else, feel free to do that.

But someone might also want to go to the source of pleasure so he can maintain state of pleasure at all times regardless of circumstances outside, meditation is one sure way to that. Just like a hard core engineer may want to know how the whole thing works down to transistor, some people eventually get this desire to experience their whole being down to one's soul and even the super soul. Such people aren't satisfied being mere servant to the needs of body or mind for whole of their lives. They want to experience the eternity if there's such a thing. It's an arduous but a rewarding journey, with wonderful experiences at every little milestone on the path. But this thread isn't an appropriate place to write details about them.

Btw if you are thinking meditation or enlightenment means withdrawal from the world, or becoming something inert or passive, or stop enjoyment/learning, then you've not understood it correctly.

Do you find it easy to confine yourself to a monastery with a bunch of dudes and no responsibilities but to "chop wood, carry water"?

If so, why don't you take this "easy" path?

Did you consider asking while meditating? In that state it's easier to reach into the unconscious, where there may well be an answer waiting for you.

That's the easy part, the difficult part is accepting the answer as it will potentially change your life dramatically.

When you understand consciousness, you can see that it operates in a fixed principle. Everything that you've done and everything that happens to you all accumulates in you. Things that are latent within you produce the phenomenon of your mind when you meet a given thing.

In order to see your mind I just check what you can see by asking you about what you say you know.

If someone says they know something, they must also show people the evidence of what they know.

You talked a lot about the effect of meditation on your mind but you don't inform people what result it has in their life. Nor do you fully realize why you are experiencing peace through that process.

What use is concentration? All the facts and phenomena that appear in people are determined by what existed in them from the past. When people get distracted it's because of their karma inside. But concentration is not the way to suppress karma, and nirvana (peace) is only attainable by fully stopping karma. The fact of the matter is that only awakening to what exists can stop karma. You have to be aware of yourself and awake to what it is all the time in order to differentiate between right and wrong. Concentration doesn't affect your ability to distinguish good from bad.

It's a fact that meditation is not how Gautama Buddha obtained Enlightenment. His ascetic practice was different than everyone around him. And after he opened his eyes through his Enlightenment, he never taught people that they should practice concentration, nor not to think. He guided them in the opposite direction and advised that people should not accept something as fact without the process of thorough confirmation. It doesn't mean concentrating on the questions. It means that you check the answers in the living reality.