- I am very confident that there are stages (or levels) to awakening that are very accessible to the average person.
- I think some of the earlier stages covered here could be achieved by the average person with ~ a month of work.
- I think achieving this would improve the average persons wellbeing between 1% - 20%.
- I think achieving the higher stages of enlightenment could raise wellbeing levels > 20%, especially if emptiness or the cessation of suffering is achieved for prolonged periods.
Why is this a field not taken seriously by EAs?
This is not central to the original question (I agree with you that poverty and preventable diseases are more pressing concerns), but for what it's worth, one shouldn't be all that nonplussed at how the “insights” one might hear from “enlightened” people sound more like the sensation of insight than the discovery of new knowledge. Most people who've found something worthwhile in meditation—and I'm speaking here as an intermediate meditator who's listened to many advanced meditators—would agree that progress/breakthroughs/the goal in meditation is not about gaining new knowledge, but rather, about seeing more clearly what is already here. (And doing so at an experiential level, not a conceptual level.)