Somebody starts doing something, and things start happening that weren't happening before.
Here's the inference they draw, given in their own voice:
If something produces results where there were none previously, then of course people will think this is progress even if it's the incorrect way. If it wasn't the right way to cultivate, they reason, how could it produce psychic abilities?1
That isn't a stupid argument. It's a perfectly ordinary appeal to evidence — the method has an output, the output is real, so the method does something. Everything up to that point holds.
The failure is in the last step, and almost nobody notices themselves taking it: from this method produces effects to this method produces the effect I want. Two different claims. The results establish the first. They don't touch the second.
The case here is an unusually clean demonstration, because the method produces genuine, impressive output and is held to be actively dangerous. The practitioners are cultivating the du-yin — the image-faculty that runs without any sensory input, the shadowed half of the ordinary sorting mind — and it works. When various small superpowers appear out of the obstruction and the unclarity it produces, most people actually think this is something special.1
The verdict on the method producing them: cultivating the du-yin is a dangerous activity because it is putting yourself on the very borders of insanity and is a state that never can be made clear.1 Real method, real output, real danger — and the output is what convinces the practitioner to carry on.
The structure generalises a long way past this material. Any method producing any noticeable effect gets defended by that effect, whether the effect is the goal, a side product, or a symptom. And the more striking the effect, the harder the defence — so the methods most likely to entrench are the ones with the most dramatic by-products, not the ones that work best.
The output has a shape, and the shape is where the argument actually gets settled. Not how much of it there is — what kind.
Because it's free of the confines of the senses, the solitary consciousness can sometimes operate outside the normal limits of space and time, which is why people sometimes know things about the future.2 Then the qualifier:
You can know small things because the du-yin has been operating free of space and time, but of course this potential only exists in regards to small things. It's never accurate in regards to big matters, which is why some psychics are right on small issues and wrong on the big picture.2
That's a signature rather than a score, and it's what makes the evidence readable. A method whose hit rate is real, frequent, and confined to things that were never going to change a decision is producing exactly what you'd expect from something that isn't reaching outside you at all.
And the whole class of output carries a stamp: the du-yin is the shadow or unclear side of the sorting mind, so even when it produces psychic phenomena, they will still be unclear.2 The unclarity isn't a defect of a particular practitioner. It's a property of the faculty.
The part that changes the moral shape of the whole thing is how people arrive in the state. It isn't by picking a bad method.
many people who meditate fall into the shadow functioning of the du-yin simply because their chi can't initially penetrate through the hind region of the brain, and through improper instructions they latch onto this somewhat confused mental state of unclarity and begin to feel that it is the correct way to cultivate.1
Two things had to go wrong together. A blockage, which is physical and nobody's fault — the energy meets a hard place at the back of the head and doesn't get through. And then bad instruction, which tells the practitioner that what they've landed in is where they were going.
So the person defending the method isn't defending a choice. They're defending a place they ended up in, described to them by somebody they trusted, and confirmed weekly by results that are perfectly real.
The same trap catches serious people at much higher levels. A practitioner called Chin reached a realm where nothing moved at all, and stayed in it for more than half a month:
Unfortunately, I had not met a venerable adept with an enlightened eye and the skillful technique to break up this realm for me. I should not have settled down here. Of this it is said, "If you do not get free of your perception of truth, it blocks correct perception."3
Your perception of truth blocks correct perception. Not your error. The thing you actually saw, correctly, is what's now in the way — and what would have got him out wasn't a better argument. It was somebody who could recognise the realm and break it up for him, and there wasn't one.
Then, in the same sentence as the results fallacy, a second thing gets named that holds these practitioners in place, and it has nothing to do with what they believe:
It's often impossible to convince these people that their cultivation methodology is all wrong, especially when they're getting results or making their living out of it.1
Or making their living out of it. Two locks in one clause, and they're different mechanisms that happen to hold the same door.
The first lock is about believing. The person has evidence, has drawn a conclusion, and the conclusion is wrong in a subtle way. In principle a better argument or a better piece of evidence could reach them — that's what the analysis of the faculty is for.
The second is about paying. It doesn't work on what somebody believes; it works on what it would cost them to revise. Anyone who teaches, charges, or has built a reputation and a livelihood on a method isn't weighing the argument on its merits, because the merits stopped being the only thing in the balance.
And impossible is the right word. Not difficult. And the impossibility doesn't imply bad faith — which is what makes the second lock so much worse than the first, since there's nobody to persuade and nothing dishonest to expose.
The sharpest statement of the cost is a line from much later in the same book: to cheat others as a way of making a living is one thing, but to cut off your wisdom life by cheating yourself is another.4 The income lock is usually discussed as a problem for the audience. It's stated here as a problem for the person holding it.
There's a feature of the results lock the passage implies without stating, and it inverts what you'd expect. The practitioners in view are producing small superpowers — minor, unclear, arriving out of what's described as an unclear stupor.1 Not levitation. Small things: knowing something, sensing something, being right about a detail.
Those lock hardest, and for three reasons that all point the same way. None of them has anything to do with the results being good.
They're frequent. A large result happens once and becomes a story. A small result happens weekly and becomes a pattern — and to the person having it, a pattern is far better evidence than one spectacular event.
They're unfalsifiable at exactly the right size. A claim to fly is checkable and fails in public. A claim to have sensed something is never quite wrong, because the hits are real and the misses were never written down.
And they're cheap enough to keep coming. A method that occasionally delivers something enormous has long droughts in which doubt can get in. A method delivering something modest every week never leaves the gap.
So lock strength isn't proportional to how impressive the output is. It's proportional to the output's frequency and its resistance to being checked — which is exactly the class of result this passage is about, and a great deal of what any method in any field delivers to the people running it. The uncomfortable version for the commercial case: steady modest returns nobody can attribute cleanly are harder to walk away from than occasional spectacular ones. The unremarkable results are the sticky ones.
The cleanest demolition of the results fallacy in this material is one sentence about somebody nobody would take advice from.
Even an insane or crazy person, who is operating within the du-yin most of the time, can sometimes make remarkably accurate and thus unnerving comments due to the workings of the solitary consciousness, but that doesn't mean that the individual is cultivating, nor that they're sane in the first place. It doesn't make their prognostications trustworthy either.2
Picture the man on the ward who says something about your father that he had no way of knowing, and is right. Everybody in the room feels it. And nobody concludes that his condition is a spiritual method or that he should be consulted about anything else.
That's the whole argument, and it works because the conclusion is already obvious in his case. He produces genuine, striking, unnerving output. He is on the same faculty as the practitioner — more of the time, in fact. And the output tells you nothing whatever about whether he's going anywhere, because he isn't going anywhere.
So the inference it produced a result, therefore the method is right has a counterexample that requires no doctrine to accept. Anybody would refuse the inference about the madman. The only question is why they accept it about themselves, and the answer is the second half of the sentence — he isn't cultivating and isn't sane, and you are, so the identical output must mean something different in your case.
It doesn't. Same faculty, same unclarity, same restriction to small things. What's different is the story attached to it.
This diagnostic runs on anybody in any field, and the two locks need testing separately, because a fix for one does nothing for the other. For the results lock, write down what the method was supposed to do — before you look at what it produced. Then compare. The failure isn't that nothing happened. It's that something happened and the goal quietly moved to match it. If your original statement of purpose no longer sounds like what you'd say now, the method has renegotiated the target and you weren't at the meeting.
Then check the shape of the results rather than their volume. Are they frequent, modest, and hard to attribute cleanly? That's the sticky profile, and it's the one that survives longest without being right. Are you recording the misses anywhere? If not, the hit rate you believe in is a number nobody has ever computed.
For the income lock, the test is a price rather than an argument. Ask what it would cost you to conclude the method was wrong — in money, in reputation, in what you'd have to tell people who took your advice. Write the figure down. You're not deciding anything with it. You're establishing that the figure exists, because the whole mechanism runs on it being invisible.
And if the number is large, stop trying to reason yourself out of it. Nobody in that position weighs an argument on its merits, and knowing that about yourself is worth more than another round of thinking about it. What works instead is structural: get the judgement made by somebody who isn't paid either way, or set the criterion in advance, while the cost of being wrong is still hypothetical.
The one thing that would have saved Chin was a person, not an idea.3 Somebody with the eye to recognise the realm he'd settled into and the technique to break it up. If your field has such people, the useful question is whether you know one — and if it doesn't, that's worth knowing too.
Ranges read: pp. 444 and 594, with footnote 518 at p. 511 checked in place. Nothing here is claimed about material outside them. [POPULAR SOURCE]. Chin's motionless realm reaches this vault at second hand, quoted from Nan Huai-Chin's To Realize Enlightenment in J. C. Cleary's translation.3
🚩 Shamans are named as the perfect example of people who cultivate the du-yin and who therefore can offer very little in terms of true knowledge, having chosen a state of uncontrolled imagery and unclear stupor.1 That's a characterisation of many living traditions, offered with no case, no source, and no distinction drawn between them. Recorded as the source's position, not adopted, and nothing on this page rests on it.
🚩 The cold-water passage lists what people who believe themselves enlightened cannot do — control their dreams, be aware while asleep, demonstrate any samādhi, produce a transformation body, communicate with spiritual beings — ending with and their legs still hurt when they meditate!4 And then, immediately: these aren't, of course, any proof of enlightenment in the first place. The list is admitted to be a list of non-proofs and is deployed as a rebuke anyway. The tension the material leaves standing is that both locks get diagnosed and only one gets a remedy. The results lock has an answer — understand the faculty, learn its signature, watch the shape of your own output. The income lock is called impossible and then nothing follows.1 The person most in need of the argument is the person the argument says it cannot reach, and no structural alternative is offered.
A second tension is that the same signature gets two different mechanisms in this corpus. Small things right and big things absent is explained here by the solitary consciousness operating free of space and time,2 and elsewhere by an assembly of stored experience. Both are printed, both predict the identical profile, and nothing distinguishes them.
Open questions. If the income lock really is impossible to argue past, what has ever actually changed anybody's method in a field where their livelihood depended on it — and was it ever an argument? And has anybody kept the misses? The whole results lock rests on a hit rate nobody has computed.
Two ways of holding the results fallacy, and they lead to different behaviour toward other people. Take it as an error of reasoning and the response is instruction. The person made a bad inference, so you show them the inference — two claims, only one established, and here's the madman as a counterexample. That treats them as mistaken and correctable, and it's what the analysis of the faculty is written for.
Take it as a position rather than a belief and instruction is beside the point. Somebody whose livelihood rests on the method isn't reasoning about it, and telling them so changes nothing except how they feel about you. That treats them as located rather than mistaken, and it points at structure — criteria set in advance, judgement made by somebody with no stake — instead of at argument.
Both appear in a single sentence, and the second quietly undercuts the first.1 The cold-water list is the same problem in action: a rebuke aimed at people the surrounding argument says can't be reached, made of items the passage concedes prove nothing.4
Read against Du-Yin and the Psi Programmes, the faculty is that page's territory and this one carries what believing its output costs. Against Superpowers Are Not Evidence, this is the same doctrine stated as a business problem rather than a doctrinal one. And Cameron and the Self-Deception of the Researcher is the income lock operating on somebody with a laboratory instead of a clientele.
Behavioral mechanics — Grace and Chosenness as Institutional Excuses. That page's mechanism is a doctrine explaining every failure as the petitioner's shortfall — exactly the kind of claim an institution would want, because it never returns a verdict against the institution.
The results fallacy is that structure running on an individual rather than an organisation, and setting them side by side shows what they share: an interpretive rule that can only ever come out one way. Under grace, a failure means you fell short and a success means the doctrine works. Under the results fallacy, an output is the method working and an absence is you not having practised enough. Nothing either believer could observe would count against what they hold.
What falls out of the pair is a test that doesn't require settling any of the substance. Ask what result would count as evidence against, and check whether the answer is available before the fact. Somebody who can't name one isn't holding a belief about the world. They're holding a position — and positions change by cost rather than by evidence.
It also explains why the income lock is the harder of the two. The cognitive version can in principle be broken by supplying the missing counterexample, which is what the madman does. The commercial and institutional versions can't, because the rule's one-sidedness is doing a job for somebody. A rule that pays its holder isn't a mistake. It's an arrangement.
One handshake. A second, on competitive pressure eventually forcing what argument can't, is carried by Religious Change Driven by Competition, Not Compassion and the pointer does the work.
Sharpest implication. The two locks want opposite responses and the same person usually has both. Argument works on the first and is wasted on the second, and there's no way to tell from outside which one you're addressing — so the reliable move is to stop arguing and change what the answer costs, which is the only lever that touches both.
Generative questions.