Program Notes
Guest speaker: Mikey Siegel
“Technology is a manifestation of mind.”
Mikey Siegel, Consciousness Hacker
Have you ever given any thought to the proposition that perhaps human well-being, or enlightenment, may be approached through engineering? In today’s podcast, which is the 2014 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Mikey Siegel, you are going to learn not only about the possibilities of such a thing as engineering enlightenment, you are also going to learn about the rapid advances that have been made in this field during the past five years. Mikey Siegel is one of the pioneers of what has come to be known as “consciousness hacking”, which is a hands-on-approach to making new tools for self-exploration.
Enlightenment engineering—tech as catalyst for inner & outer peace:
Mikey Siegel at TEDxSantaCruz
BioFluent Technologies: tools for integrating body, mind and spirit
Consciousness Hacking is a hands-on approach to making new tools for self-exploration, in order to change the way we think, feel, and live.
Psychedelic Thinking And The Dawn of Homo Cyber (PDF)
Lorenzo’s May 2001 Mind States Talk
Podcast 001 – “Psychedelic Thinking and the Dawn of Homo Cyber”
Podcast 226-McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 4
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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And before I introduce today’s program, I want to let you know about a little addition that I made to our Program Notes blog,
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which, as you probably know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
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As you may know, for a long time I’ve displayed one of my email addresses on that site,
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but over time it’s attracted so many spammers as, well, it’s almost
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useless right now. And so at long last, and after many requests, I finally got off dead center and
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added some contact information, or I should say a contact form, to our site. And I’m happy to say
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that several of our sauners have already found it and used it, so it seems to be working quite well.
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Also, you may notice that I reorganized that long list of categories
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into a hierarchical structure and put them all in a drop-down menu
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to make things a little easier for you.
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And for what it’s worth,
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I finally understand what some of our fellow salonners have been saying
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about how out-of- date our program notes site is.
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And while it won’t be fixed right away, by early next year I plan on having a new site ready
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and including some of the social networking features of BuddyPress and its add-ons.
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So if you have some favorite features that you think I should include,
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please leave a comment in the program notes for today’s podcast.
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And speaking of today’s podcast, I’m happy to introduce Mikey Siegel to you.
00:01:53 ►
His LinkedIn page describes Mikey as a consciousness hacker, and in a few moments I’m sure that you’re going to understand what that means.
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The talk of Mikey’s that I’m going to play today is the
00:02:05 ►
Palenque Norte lecture that he gave at last year’s Burning Man Festival, and it was titled
00:02:11 ►
Engineering Enlightenment. Now, to tell the truth, I wish that I haven’t been so tardy in publishing
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last year’s lectures, because this is one that should have been out shortly after he gave it.
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It should have been out shortly after he gave it.
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You see, in May of 2001, before all of the 9-11 craziness and stuff,
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I gave a talk at the MindStates conference titled Psychedelic Thinking and the Dawn of Homo Cyber.
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And that was the talk that you can hear in my podcast number one.
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Now, if I had decided to end these podcasts today, which I’m not going to do, but if I were to end them today, then today’s talk by Mikey would be the perfect ending to a series that began with that Mind States talk of mine.
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I don’t know how old Mikey is today, but my guess is that when I gave that talk, he was still in high school.
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But he was exactly one of the persons whom I hoped would somehow get the message that I tried to put out that day.
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In fact, what he and some of his associates have done is to take the idea of psychedelic technology to the next level.
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In fact, they have taken it to levels that I didn’t even dream of 14 years ago. Now my new wish is that there are a lot of our fellow slaughters who are in
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high school right now and college who will hear what Mikey has to say and then take his ideas to
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yet another level. And since I don’t expect you to go back and listen to my entire talk,
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instead let me just read one paragraph from it that relates to what you are about to hear from Mikey.
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And I quote, I’m quoting myself.
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It is no secret that some of our best minds are working overtime on the development of what can be called digital drugs.
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This new generation of virtual reality devices will be able to launch you into entheospace just as effectively as does LSD today. The commercial availability of these devices will most likely signal the beginning of
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the last battle in the war on drugs. Finally, we will be able to reframe the issue into what it is
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really all about, the right to control our own state of consciousness. The Alchemine Society calls this cognitive liberty and defines it as the right of each
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individual to think independently, to use the full spectrum of his or her mind, and
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to engage in multiple modes of thought and alternative states of consciousness.
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Now, when the first government hearings are held in an attempt to ban these
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new silicon-based cognitive tools, the power elite are going to be forced to confront the fact
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that it is human thought that they want to control. It is not the substances that the
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mainstream culture fears, it is the psychedelic thinking that these substances promote,
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which is actually under attack.
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Now that’s the end quote from that talk, and of course there’s much more to it, but just that one paragraph should give you an idea of how excited I am to discover that while
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I was sleeping more or less, people like Mikey Siegel were staying up late at night and building
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the machines of my dreams.
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Now here’s Mikey.
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Thank you all so much for coming out on this warm Burning Man afternoon. My name’s Mikey
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Siegel, and I’m going to be talking about Enlightenment Engineering, which really is, for me, it’s in one aspect a new way of thinking about how we as a species can relate to technology and how technology can be used much in the same capacity that
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the countless traditions that have been around for many, many thousands of years have been used for
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human transformation and expansion and shift in human consciousness.
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consciousness. And so my hope is at the end of the talk that what we walk away with is at least like a glimmer, a new perspective, a new way of thinking about the relationship
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between humans and technology, and a new way of thinking about the capacity for technology
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to change our human experience
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and our experience as social and cultural entities
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in a very deep and fundamental way.
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So I’m going to go through, I think, maybe more as a story
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and talk about how I kind of got started on this path
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and then some of the projects that I’ve been involved in.
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And it’s not going to be a super technical talk,
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but I’ll talk about some examples of some interesting technologies
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that are floating around.
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And then end off with maybe some visions for the future,
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some visions for what’s possible.
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end off with maybe some visions for the future, some visions for what’s possible.
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So my background is as a somewhat traditional engineer.
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I got a degree in computer engineering, and then I kind of like hit the engineer jackpot, and I was doing my graduate work in robotics at MIT,
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and was kind of doing all this really awesome,
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amazing, cool, fun, very technical kind of stuff
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and ended up graduating
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and going to work in the same field of engineering.
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I’m going to stand.
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And what I found was that even though I was doing what I had sort of on my list, my sort of bucket list of things that I wanted to get done, as I’m sure many of you in your life have discovered or maybe you’ve been lucky enough to discover,
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When you sort of check off the list of preconceived ideas of what you think you’re supposed to do to kind of reach your happiness state,
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or your state of contentment, or your state of wholeness, or when all these things get done, then life will be good, and then everything will be complete.
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I kind of got a lot of those checked off and realized I still wasn’t there. There was still a sense of incompleteness. There was still a sense of longing, of searching, of seeking, of yearning.
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And so I jumped off the engineering path.
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But as an engineer, as a scientist, as someone with a very logical and rational mind,
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went off in search of trying to understand how it is that we can realize or experience a deep fundamental sense of well-being,
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a fundamental sense of feeling okay, feeling content, feeling balanced with what is here and now.
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And not necessarily looking for a new healing modality or looking for a practice to change my external life circumstances,
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but really trying to get to the very, very heart of human suffering.
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And what I discovered after a lot of searching
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and long meditation retreats and psychedelics and ayahuasca
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and all these kinds of things.
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What I discovered was that there are thousands of years and countless traditions
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that are designed specifically for this,
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that are designed specifically to get to the very root of human suffering and to resolve the illusion or the false sense of separateness,
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however you want to say it,
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that is at the ground, at the base of what creates the conflict,
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the internal conflict that mentally caused suffering in our lives.
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And so I started to look into these traditions,
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and what I began to appreciate was that these were very systematic,
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very precise, very thorough processes that someone could walk through
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that were created by people with an incredible scientific,
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even engineering-level understanding of human consciousness
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from their own systematic exploration of the nature of mind and reality.
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Whether it’s Buddhist traditions or yogic traditions,
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these are systems created by humans.
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These are essentially technologies.
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And they’re technologies
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that have been iterated on
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over and over and over again
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for thousands of years.
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And they work, you they work pretty well.
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I mean, for some people they can be successful,
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so for some people they can’t.
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And sometimes they can take a very long time,
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and there’s a lot of cultural stories that are woven into
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how long it’s supposed to take,
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and what sort of arduous path we’re supposed to go on,
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and how many years we’re supposed to spend in the cave
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before this or that happens.
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But stepping back and looking at these traditions
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from an engineer’s perspective,
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realized that these systems could still continue to be optimized.
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They could continue to be evolved.
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They could continue to be enhanced.
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And we weren’t limited by language, written and spoken,
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which is the predominant technology that all of the spiritual traditions
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that I’m sure any of you have interacted with have relied on.
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Either you’re listening to someone speak, or you’re reading a book,
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or you’re chanting, or somehow some kind of information is being conveyed to you conceptually, because just these manifestations of thought, of idea.
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And that all of the technology that we’re creating around us,
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the cell phones, Facebook, rockets that we launch to other planets,
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launch to other planets. All of these things are also just creative impulse, the mind of human manifested into a physical form. And so the only limitation in the technology that we’re creating
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is human ingenuity, human creativity. And the only thing that was keeping the technology that we were building
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from serving the exact same purpose that these ancient traditions were serving
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was our own volition, our own interest,
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our own capacity to imagine what these technologies could do.
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And so that struck me very clearly,
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that I could actually bring these two things together, that I could actually approach this problem of human suffering in the same way that it had been approached from the perspective of Buddhism, from the perspective of yoga traditions, from the perspective of countless other traditions, I could approach it as an engineer,
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I could approach it as a scientist,
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could put it, frame it in a scientific lens,
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understand the mechanisms behind human suffering,
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understand how enlightenment essentially works in the brain, in the body.
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And once you have a map of how this
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works, once you can build a scientific understanding of enlightenment, for example,
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well, then you can follow that map and you can build tools based on it. So in the same way that
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our understanding of smallpox, for example, from a biological science perspective,
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allowed us to actually create a vaccine to completely eradicate smallpox from the face of the earth,
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there’s no reason, actually, why our understanding of human suffering,
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the internal mentally curated causes of human suffering,
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which is understood from spiritual and religious traditions,
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there’s no reason why understanding that from a scientific perspective
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can’t then lead to or help catalyze the creation of advanced technologies
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that can essentially help catalyze or guide or facilitate people
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to a state free of suffering or enlightenment,
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whatever you want to call it.
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So I got excited about this idea of engineering enlightenment.
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And so I started looking around to find what I was sure would be
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lots of other people that are looking into this.
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And I searched.
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Actually, I searched on the Internet, but I searched all over the world.
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I was emailing professors.
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I was planning on going back to grad school.
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And it was a little bit of a problem
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because no one had any idea what I was talking about.
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This is a completely foreign idea.
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What you find in academia is meditation research.
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And even meditation research is only really acceptable in mainstream academic context
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in the last maybe 10, 15, maybe 20 years. Now, meditation research is
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ubiquitous. If you want to go to a major university and scan, you know, put monks inside of a
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fMRI machine and scan their brain, it’s totally fine. It’s totally great. But you can only research
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meditation if it’s under the guise of a specific clinical condition. You have to be
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researching depression. You have to be researching Alzheimer’s. You have to be researching, you know,
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depression, something like that, anxiety. So because we think of everything in terms of
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the pharmaceutical model, this is a machine and we’re trying
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to fix one specific problem in the machine. And so we go through systematically and we
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say, okay, what little problem, in what ways can meditation replace a pill essentially?
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But if you try to actually talk about the fundamental reason why meditation, for the most part, was actually invented,
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why these tools were actually created,
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why these monks, and probably many of you in this room,
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have spent perhaps hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of hours
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engaged in these practices.
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It’s because these practices offer a salvation of sorts.
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These practices are not just for their own sake.
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These practices, from a neurological perspective,
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can produce very distinct changes in the brain,
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in the way that the brain is structured physically,
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but also in the way that various brain networks relate to each other.
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But from an experiential perspective,
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the results, the potential results of these practices
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is a distinct change in our experience of reality,
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a distinct shift in our sense of self
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and its relationship to the outside world,
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the relationship between a supposed subject and object,
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our sense of agency, our sense of who is doing this,
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but most importantly, the fundamental causes of mental conflict
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that create predominantly the suffering in our lives
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that not only can be eradicated,
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but it’s something that happens quite frequently and is just beginning to
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be studied from a scientific perspective. So going back, trying to talk to these professors
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that are doing research on meditation about post-traumatic stress disorder and saying, hey,
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I want to build a machine that reads a certain part of people’s brain
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and then provides some audio-visual feedback to guide them in a highly efficient way
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towards this experience that you’re not even really talking about in your research
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because you’re not allowed to in academia.
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Totally a completely foreign idea.
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Not happening. No one’s really thinking about it.
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Frankly, it’s, it’s in an academic
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context, uh, pretty new. Um, so what I ended up doing is, um, uh, searching around and I ended
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up finding a few people that were, that were into this. I found some great collaborators. Actually,
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I think, uh, one of them, I think both of them might have been speaking
00:19:45 ►
here at some point earlier in the week. And I spent about a year or year and a half researching
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every imaginable technology that could be used in this regard. So every kind of brain stimulation
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technology, electrical brain stimulation, magnetic brain
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stimulation, ultrasound brain stimulation, light stimulation, sound stimulation, you
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can look at various types of feedback technologies, technologies that can read the brain in different
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ways using electrical activity of the brain, the magnetic activity of the brain.
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There’s really an incredible number of possible routes that you could take.
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The brain is a central point of focus because it seems to be related so deeply to our conscious
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experience, but you can also take a focus on what’s happening in the body as well.
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So the interesting thing is when I take a step back and I look around at the trends, the technological trends that seem to be happening,
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to me it seems like this path of trying to think about technology in a new way is actually happening on its own.
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in a new way is actually happening on its own.
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It actually seems to be a natural trend that is emerging, whether or not I do anything about it or anyone else does anything about it, which is a little bit counterintuitive.
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Because if we think about the technologies that we use every day, these are technologies that for the most part increase our mental activity externalize our
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attention and create a um an increased amount of content or information that we’re consumed with
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think about all the technologies that you interact with whether it’s your phone
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your television your you know your radio, whatever it is,
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these are providing feeds, updates, Twitter updates, Facebook feeds, graphs, charts,
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even the wearable technologies that start beginning to emerge are also just about providing content and information.
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You wear a device around your wrist for a week,
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and then at the end of the week,
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you look at a chart or a graph,
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and it gives you some status update
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on how many miles you’ve walked
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or how much food you’ve eaten.
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But all of these things,
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all of these content or information-based technologies
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actually draw us away, arguably, from the
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experience that we’re seeking. And if you think about the most meaningful experiences in your
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life, they’re probably not going to have anything to do with information or content.
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They’re probably going to be completely non-conceptual experiences that are very much
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grounded in a present moment felt experience. Whether it’s watching a beautiful sunset,
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spending time with someone that you love,
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some crazy adventure you had out here at Burning Man
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where you saw some tripped out robot thing
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dancing with fire coming out of its face.
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It wasn’t that there was a chart next to it
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that told you how you should feel
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or some information graph
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that conveyed to
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you something important. It was that the experience itself, the visceral experience there in the
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moment and the feeling that came up, that’s what was significant. And the technologies that we’re
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using actually bring us away from that. They bring us to a more mentally occupied state of mind. But what’s interesting is
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if you look at the trend of the technologies,
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we are increasingly moving towards technologies
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that in some way or another monitor what we are,
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what we are doing, how we’re feeling,
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what our bodies are doing,
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whether it’s movement tracking, tracking your pulse,
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wearable EEGs, which measure brain activity, which are now becoming more popular.
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Now, these are all forms of essentially technology-assisted self-reflection.
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These are mirrors of a sort that provide us some insight into what is happening inside of us.
00:24:05 ►
And what’s interesting is,
00:24:07 ►
if we think about some of the most effective techniques
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that we can use for transformation,
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they are all in some way a form of self-reflection.
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Watching your breath.
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Watching your thoughts.
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Watching the whole of experience
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pass through your consciousness.
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These are feedback loops that we’re setting up
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where we can basically
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bring back that present moment experience
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into our consciousness
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and get sort of caught in that present moment experience into our consciousness and get sort of caught in that present moment
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experience loop in the constantly changing fabric of this moment.
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And so technology is perfect for doing this same kind of thing.
00:25:02 ►
So I’ll give you some examples of some of the technologies
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I think are most interesting in going down this path
00:25:10 ►
of sort of this enlightenment engineering.
00:25:13 ►
So I mentioned that there’s nothing happening in academia.
00:25:17 ►
It’s actually not true.
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There’s one main project that I know of
00:25:20 ►
that I think is worth mentioning.
00:25:21 ►
And this is a good example of looking forward what I think is worth mentioning. And this is a good example of looking forward what
00:25:26 ►
I think is possible and what I think are some of the most likely approaches that we can
00:25:30 ►
take. There’s a researcher named Judson Brewer and a few other researchers that were based
00:25:36 ►
out of Yale. And part of their research was taking not just experienced meditators, but, and this was not something
00:25:48 ►
they could actually publish in their research, but something that was part of their criteria
00:25:53 ►
for choosing these subjects. But meditators that had actually, by the approval of whatever
00:26:01 ►
tradition that they were in, had actually transitioned into a persistent enlightenment experience.
00:26:08 ►
Not where they had had some passing mystical experience,
00:26:11 ►
but they had actually had a persistent shift in their experience.
00:26:15 ►
And you take these meditators,
00:26:19 ►
you put them into a machine called an fMRI machine.
00:26:21 ►
And what this machine does is it scans the activity inside
00:26:25 ►
of your brain. And you can actually watch certain areas light up as essentially the blood flow
00:26:33 ►
changes inside the brain. Now, if you have these meditators transition into different states,
00:26:41 ►
then you can actually watch and say, well, interesting, this person’s brain is distinct
00:26:48 ►
from this other person’s brain who doesn’t meditate, or from this group of people that
00:26:53 ►
doesn’t meditate. And you can also say, when this person transitions into these different states,
00:26:59 ►
their brain also looks different, and all of these meditators have a common pattern.
00:27:03 ►
And that’s what they found in
00:27:05 ►
this particular research they found that in these two networks in the brain one called the task
00:27:11 ►
network and one called the default mode network and these are sort of the main brain networks
00:27:16 ►
that kick on sort of oscillating back and forth in our normal day-to-day life when you’re sitting
00:27:21 ►
and you’re sort of not doing anything and your mind is kind of wandering and you’re sort of in a daydream state, that’s your default network kicking in. And then
00:27:29 ►
when you’re tasked with something, you’re focused on something, you’re actively doing it, that’s
00:27:33 ►
your task network kicking in. And interestingly for these long-term meditators, what they found is
00:27:38 ►
there’s a certain pattern of deactivation in the default network. And there’s a certain pattern where normally it’s just one or the other
00:27:47 ►
oscillating back and forth, but these things actually start,
00:27:50 ►
these separate networks actually start to oscillate more in harmony with each other.
00:27:56 ►
But what’s interesting is once you can identify this part of the brain
00:28:02 ►
that you’re interested in, that you think is most related
00:28:04 ►
to realizing this state of the brain that you’re interested in that you think is most related to realizing
00:28:06 ►
this state of consciousness, what you can actually do is you can train people using that information
00:28:14 ►
to attain that state. So the way this would work is you take a person that doesn’t have a lot of
00:28:20 ►
meditation experience, you slide them inside of an fMRI machine and you scan this particular part
00:28:26 ►
of the brain that we’re interested in. And you’re watching to see, does that part of the brain
00:28:31 ►
increase or decrease in activity? This is a fairly simplistic model, but, and they’ll become more
00:28:38 ►
sophisticated over time, but this actually is the way that they were doing it. And so if I was doing
00:28:43 ►
it, I’d be sitting in the machine and I would see a screen in front of me. And that screen would have like a bar graph.
00:28:51 ►
And the more activity there was in this part of my brain, the higher the bar graph would go.
00:28:56 ►
And the less activity there was in this part of the brain, the lower the bar graph would go.
00:29:01 ►
And what you say to that person is, lower the bar graph. Now, if I were
00:29:07 ►
to say to you, Hey, decrease the activity in your posticular cichlid cortex, you wouldn’t really
00:29:13 ►
know how to do that. I mean, you wouldn’t know how to do that at all. It doesn’t make any sense.
00:29:17 ►
You can’t really like actively control a part of your brain in the same way you can control your
00:29:21 ►
finger. But the interesting thing is once you create a
00:29:25 ►
feedback loop, once you create the ability for you to actually have some knowledge about what’s
00:29:30 ►
happening in these areas inside your brain, you can actually teach people to control that area
00:29:36 ►
inside the brain. And that’s called neurofeedback. It’s been around for a long time. And now there’s
00:29:40 ►
a renaissance in neurofeedback happening in academia using much more sophisticated equipment.
00:29:45 ►
And so what happened with these novice meditators is that, and it’s actually, there’s one interesting anecdotal story where one of them is sitting in the machine.
00:29:53 ►
And you can see the graph of sort of how they’re able to change this part of the brain.
00:29:58 ►
And when they figure it out, the meditator, this novice meditator, said something interesting.
00:30:06 ►
figure it out, the meditator, this novice meditator said something interesting. He said, oh, I see.
00:30:13 ►
It’s not about thinking about my breath. It’s about feeling my breath. And once there was that distinct transition where that person was able to go into a more experientially dominated experience
00:30:20 ►
rather than a conceptually dominated experience, they had a corresponding change in
00:30:26 ►
what was happening in their brain. And all of this was facilitated through this guided fMRI-based
00:30:33 ►
neurofeedback. So this is something that requires, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of
00:30:37 ►
equipment inside of a lab. But this is just one example of what I think are many different possible approaches to walking down this path.
00:30:48 ►
So I think maybe the, oh, by the way, if anyone has any questions at any point while I’m talking,
00:30:54 ►
you guys can all feel free to interrupt.
00:30:56 ►
You can make it interactive if you want.
00:31:02 ►
So maybe the next fun thing would be to sort of go through some other examples of technologies that I think are interesting and maybe some technologies that I’m actually working on.
00:31:14 ►
So some other examples of really promising technologies that are out there, the types of things that I think we’re going to begin to see.
00:31:22 ►
One example are brain stimulation technologies.
00:31:27 ►
And this is something that probably most people don’t know about right now, but there are already
00:31:32 ►
a few consumer devices that are appearing on the market, and there will be a flood of them,
00:31:36 ►
I promise, in the next five to ten years. And what these devices do is they’re able to actually
00:31:43 ►
change the activity in some specific area of the brain.
00:31:46 ►
That might be using a small electric current. Some of those technologies are called TDCS or
00:31:53 ►
transcranial direct current stimulation, and it actually runs a very small amount of electricity
00:31:58 ►
through your brain, and that can actually change the way your brain works. Other types of technologies
00:32:02 ►
actually use ultrasound to stimulate your brain.
00:32:06 ►
And there’s actually a guy in the Bay Area who’s building a DIY version of an ultrasound brain
00:32:13 ►
stimulator. And what this can actually do is pinpoint a small area in the brain and increase
00:32:18 ►
or decrease the activity in the brain. And there’s a bunch of other examples as well, but what this is opening the door to is what I think will be way beyond what we saw, continue to see in the entheogenic or psychedelic
00:32:36 ►
space. In the chemical ability to control human consciousness, I think what we’ll find is that technology
00:32:45 ►
is actually a much more powerful tool.
00:32:49 ►
Because with technology, what you can do
00:32:51 ►
is you can control in a much more active,
00:32:56 ►
much more real-time, much more precise way.
00:32:59 ►
You can actively monitor, for example, the entire brain.
00:33:03 ►
And by watching what’s happening inside the brain,
00:33:06 ►
you can get an idea for someone’s shifts in experience. You can monitor, for example,
00:33:11 ►
if we’re talking about meditation, to what degree they’re going into or out of thought,
00:33:15 ►
or what degree that they’re entering into certain genres or whatever it might be.
00:33:18 ►
And you can actually sort of tweak and change and turn knobs and turn dials and increase the
00:33:23 ►
activity here and decrease the activity there.
00:33:25 ►
And you can actually sort of actively control this whole machine up here, this sort of consciousness
00:33:31 ►
antenna to guide people into specific experiences.
00:33:39 ►
And I think there’s no question in my mind that what I’m interested in is, of course, enlightenment engineering, using this for the expansion and transformation of human consciousness.
00:33:54 ►
But all of these technologies are double-edged swords.
00:33:59 ►
So in the same way that you may be able to use these technologies for this, what I would consider a
00:34:05 ►
very useful and positive thing, the eradication of human suffering,
00:34:10 ►
I believe you can also, with these technologies, make some of the most addicting
00:34:14 ►
interactions ever known to man, more addicting than even the most addicting drugs ever created.
00:34:26 ►
to man, more addicting than even the most addicting drugs ever created. You can make things that can produce any imaginable type of human experience from the greatest anger, fear,
00:34:33 ►
hatred, whatever it is. So once you start being able to tweak with the deeper foundations of our
00:34:39 ►
conscious experience, you start to open up some interesting doors. So to give you an example of something that I’m working on
00:34:49 ►
that I think has some interesting possibility,
00:34:53 ►
there’s a…
00:34:54 ►
So as I mentioned, there’s a whole wave of these consumer EEG devices
00:34:59 ►
that are entering into the market.
00:35:01 ►
And what these devices do is you put them on your head,
00:35:04 ►
and they can actually measure the activity inside your brain.
00:35:08 ►
And these devices cost 200, $300.
00:35:12 ►
And the product that I’m working on right now
00:35:16 ►
actually takes these brain waves that are being measured by this machine
00:35:21 ►
and turns them into music.
00:35:28 ►
And the idea is this. The idea is that now, um, the idea is that by actually being able to hear this music created by your brain,
00:35:38 ►
where the music is a form of self-reflection, The music is like a fabric or tapestry
00:35:45 ►
representing all the myriad changes going on
00:35:48 ►
that can be measured inside of your brain.
00:35:50 ►
By listening to this over time,
00:35:53 ►
not only do you begin to learn these patterns,
00:35:56 ►
you begin to understand, oh, when that melody shifts,
00:35:59 ►
when these tones come in,
00:36:01 ►
ah, when this harmony transforms in this way,
00:36:04 ►
you can begin to build a relationship
00:36:05 ►
between that music and your own conscious experience. Oh, when I’m focused and I’m working
00:36:12 ►
and I’m in the flow, that sounds like this. Ah, when I get angry, when I’m unfocused, when I’m
00:36:19 ►
distracted, ah, that has this kind of composition, this kind of sound, this kind of texture.
00:36:23 ►
ah, that has this kind of composition, this kind of sound, this kind of texture.
00:36:29 ►
As you begin to become fluent in this sort of soundtrack of your own mind,
00:36:36 ►
the idea is that, and this is based on the very well-established premise of neurofeedback,
00:36:40 ►
is that if you know the state you want to get to,
00:36:43 ►
and you know what it sounds like,
00:36:48 ►
and you also know your musical path to get to, and you know what it sounds like, and you also know your musical path to get there,
00:36:55 ►
which is essentially a musical composition, by basically playing this music with your mind, you are guiding your own conscious experience through the music.
00:36:59 ►
And so the idea is that in this scenario, you’re not actually telling people the right place to go or the wrong place to go,
00:37:08 ►
but you’re giving them a deep insight, a deep level of self-awareness that you’re facilitating using this technology
00:37:14 ►
to help them learn to become more self-aware and guide their own experience.
00:37:20 ►
No, so that’s a technology that I’m working on right now.
00:37:23 ►
So we have some prototypes that are pretty interesting. And so that’s an example of something that I’m working on right now. So we have some prototypes that are pretty interesting.
00:37:25 ►
And so that’s an example of something that I’m working on that I think is interesting.
00:37:29 ►
Yes.
00:37:30 ►
Yeah, so it’s a little more complex than that.
00:37:34 ►
It probably, well, you’re not measuring necessarily emotion directly in the brain.
00:37:40 ►
You’re measuring things that are a little bit more abstract and harder to pin down in terms of how they directly relate to our experience.
00:37:50 ►
But more in this case, what you’d be trying to do is to create a really complex texture of sound where it wouldn’t just be one sound happening or another sound happening.
00:38:00 ►
At any given moment, there could be dozens of different simultaneous threads of sound
00:38:05 ►
that are going on because it’s a lot of information, a lot of complexity in terms of what’s
00:38:09 ►
happening in the brain. And you wouldn’t even necessarily be pinpointing and saying, oh, that
00:38:14 ►
sound corresponds to this thing in my brain. It would be more of a non-conceptual kind of feeling
00:38:19 ►
where you would learn the relationship. Just like when you hear a song, it makes you feel a certain
00:38:23 ►
way. You don’t even necessarily have to articulate how that song makes you feel, but you’re still
00:38:29 ►
familiar with that feeling at a deeper non-conceptual level. Does that make any sense? Yeah. Okay. So
00:38:38 ►
I see what you’re saying. There’s different ways of doing the feedback. One way would be to try to
00:38:44 ►
get you to feel a specific thing.
00:38:46 ►
So let’s say I was trying to guide you in a certain direction.
00:38:50 ►
Then I would want a certain sound to feel better
00:38:53 ►
and a certain sound maybe to be more dissonant.
00:38:56 ►
And then you would naturally sort of guide yourself
00:38:58 ►
to the more harmonious sound
00:39:00 ►
and guide yourself away from the more dissonant sound.
00:39:02 ►
And that’s one way of doing feedback.
00:39:09 ►
The goal with this, and it’s not possible, but sort of the theoretical point we’re trying to reach, is a more neutral sound space where you’re not favoring or biasing one
00:39:14 ►
area of the sound space over another. You allow people to build their own interpretation of the
00:39:19 ►
sound space and how it relates to their own experience. And of course, there’s going to be
00:39:23 ►
difficulties there and there are some difficulties there, but that’s the goal,
00:39:26 ►
is not to try to say, oh, this is a more positive-sounding tonal space
00:39:30 ►
and this is a more negative-sounding tonal space,
00:39:32 ►
because we’re trying to not actually interpret these things for you.
00:39:35 ►
We’re trying to leave it open so that you can create your own interpretation.
00:39:39 ►
Yeah, it’s interesting.
00:39:41 ►
A lot of that relates to context.
00:39:44 ►
So I’m really interested in technologies that can be
00:39:47 ►
used. I call it full-time, real-time feedback. So technologies that can in some way augment our
00:39:53 ►
waking experience. Something that you could be wearing, just like we have our wearables now,
00:39:58 ►
except the difference is instead of just tracking information for you to look at on a computer a week later as a chart or a graph.
00:40:06 ►
What if instead you’re wearing a technology that can directly monitor some aspect of your level of
00:40:13 ►
anxiety, your level of stress, your level of presence, the degree to which you’re sort of lost
00:40:19 ►
in sort of a mentally preoccupied state versus grounded and present moment experience.
00:40:25 ►
And that technology could give you direct feedback
00:40:28 ►
as you walk around, while you drive your car,
00:40:30 ►
while you’re sitting at work,
00:40:32 ►
while you’re walking through the playa, whatever it is.
00:40:36 ►
We could potentially use those tools
00:40:38 ►
as a way to give us a deep and regular feedback
00:40:43 ►
into our normal waking life instead of reserving it
00:40:48 ►
for these few times we sit on the cushion or whatever it might be. So to answer your question,
00:40:53 ►
you can’t really do that with visual stimuli because it detracts so much from the kind of
00:41:04 ►
processing that we need to do in our normal waking experience,
00:41:06 ►
whereas you can actually wear headphones,
00:41:09 ►
and you can walk around, and you can drive your car,
00:41:12 ►
and you can sit at your computer and do work.
00:41:15 ►
So in terms of the context of normal experience,
00:41:19 ►
sound is less at odds with that.
00:41:25 ►
Hey.
00:41:27 ►
Yeah, well, so I think what you’re getting at
00:41:29 ►
is do you even have to be aware that this is going on?
00:41:32 ►
Yeah, and I don’t think that you actually do,
00:41:35 ►
and I think that’s where a lot of the brain stimulation technologies
00:41:38 ►
will come into play.
00:41:39 ►
I think that what I just talked about with the music
00:41:42 ►
is what I would call a form of feedback technology,
00:41:50 ►
where it’s measuring something and then feeding that back to you in some way in order to guide you to some experience.
00:41:56 ►
But there’s also a different way of doing it, where I could actually measure what’s happening inside your brain or inside your body.
00:42:05 ►
And then I could use, for example, a small amount of electrical current to then adjust and tweak and change that part of the brain in order to continually bring you back and continually guide you.
00:42:09 ►
Almost like if you had, let’s say, a very intuitive meditation instructor, right?
00:42:11 ►
That could sort of sit next to you while you’re meditating.
00:42:16 ►
And every time you went off into thought, sort of tap you on the shoulder to bring you back.
00:42:20 ►
Well, that tapping on the shoulder or that whisper in the ear or whatever it might be is a form of brain stimulation.
00:42:22 ►
Whether it’s sound or contact or whatever it is.
00:42:26 ►
You can imagine a very similar thing with a form of electrical stimulation
00:42:30 ►
that’s very pointed, very directed, and very precise.
00:42:32 ►
That can have the exact same purpose of guiding you back, guiding you back, guiding you back.
00:42:37 ►
So in terms of ultrasonic sound, I’m not super familiar with our ability to respond to ultrasonic sound in that way,
00:42:49 ►
but I think generally speaking, yeah, you could do it with other stuff. Hey.
00:42:58 ►
Yeah. So there’s no shortage of people developing interventions for pathologies or for clinical conditions.
00:43:07 ►
I would say, actually, that’s predominantly what’s happening.
00:43:10 ►
There’s no one, as far as I can tell, developing technologies for what I consider to be much more fundamental,
00:43:18 ►
the fundamental root of actual human suffering, to try to get to the very core of that.
00:43:27 ►
actual human suffering, to try to get to the very core of that. And from my perspective, a lot of the larger global strife that we see comes from, I guess, in one sense, you could say
00:43:38 ►
this fundamental sense of separateness. The idea that there’s a me, and there’s these bad guys out there, or there’s the me and then there’s this earth down here.
00:43:48 ►
The maliciousness, the greed, the fear, the anger, all of that comes from this division between self and other.
00:43:56 ►
All of that comes from these mentally constructed ideas that we cling to as truth about who’s bad, who’s good, what’s right, and what’s wrong.
00:44:06 ►
And it’s that existence of being stuck and dominated by that mentally created supposed truth,
00:44:15 ►
these belief structures that we cling to as if they’re reality itself,
00:44:18 ►
that actually seems to create a lot of the suffering in the world
00:44:23 ►
and a lot of the global catastrophe in the world.
00:44:25 ►
And so from my perspective, using technology to get at that fundamental illusion, to get at that
00:44:31 ►
fundamental core, is potentially the kind of transformative intervention that could actually
00:44:38 ►
solve problems from the inside out, as opposed to looking at the surface manifestation of the problem and saying,
00:44:45 ►
oh shit, we really fucked up our oceans, or wow, these guys are fighting, like send in more troops,
00:44:50 ►
or whatever it is. Start at the very root of it. Start at the very heart of the issue. And I sort
00:44:55 ►
of didn’t directly answer your question, but I guess just to say that, yes, I think this should
00:44:59 ►
be addressed towards clinical conditions, of course, and I think that there’s a lot of work
00:45:04 ►
going in that direction, and I also that there’s a lot of work going in
00:45:05 ►
that direction. And I also believe that this work kind of gets even deeper below that. Yes. Yeah.
00:45:11 ►
Okay, cool. So it’s interesting. So there’s not a whole lot of stuff out there. Here’s some
00:45:18 ►
interesting stuff that I think would be worth checking out. And this is some of the foundational
00:45:22 ►
information that I draw from. There’s a
00:45:27 ►
researcher that I’ve worked a lot with. His name’s Jeffrey Martin. And he was supposed to be speaking
00:45:32 ►
here, and I think he didn’t make it to Burning Man, unfortunately. And the work that he did
00:45:37 ►
is very interesting because he was one of the first people to take a very scientifically grounded
00:45:42 ►
approach to researching enlightenment, not from
00:45:46 ►
any particular religious perspective and not limited to any particular spiritual tradition.
00:45:52 ►
Across traditions, whether it’s Buddhism, yogic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, you name it,
00:45:59 ►
people that didn’t even have any specific meditation tradition at all, what he looked for was an underlying
00:46:05 ►
pattern, an underlying pattern that didn’t need to rely on any spiritual language at all. Looking
00:46:11 ►
at things like memory, cognition, various aspects of psychology and behavior, and even aspects of
00:46:20 ►
certain neural signatures. And from that, you can begin to build this model
00:46:25 ►
of enlightenment, essentially,
00:46:27 ►
or what actually probably should be called
00:46:29 ►
persistent non-symbolic experience,
00:46:31 ►
which is the clinical term for it in this context,
00:46:34 ►
to actually build a model for it
00:46:36 ►
that you can begin to talk about,
00:46:38 ►
not as a spiritual thing,
00:46:39 ►
but as a very real, measurable, and attainable phenomenon
00:46:44 ►
that thousands and thousands of people experience.
00:46:47 ►
That’s a distinct, persistent change.
00:46:50 ►
And some of the qualities of this persistent change include
00:46:53 ►
a shift in the perceived sense of self from a localized self,
00:46:59 ►
contained like inside of you looking out,
00:47:01 ►
to a more expanded sense of self that is more boundless.
00:47:08 ►
Emotion, there are distinct emotional changes from predominantly negative or a mix of negative
00:47:13 ►
and positive emotion, transitioning to predominantly positive emotion, to a more sort of a yuna
00:47:19 ►
kind of heart-centered sort of love-based kind of emotion, even at far stages or certain parts
00:47:26 ►
of the spectrum to no emotion at all. And there are other aspects such as agency, for example,
00:47:33 ►
the perception that there is a you that is doing this. So there is this subject and this object,
00:47:39 ►
and that I am the one doing it, and I’m in control, to an increasing sense that this is just happening,
00:47:48 ►
that reality is just unfolding, and there is no doer.
00:47:49 ►
There is just this.
00:47:51 ►
And so these are some qualities that you can look at that you can measure through questions and through inquiry
00:47:55 ►
that doesn’t have to rely and can bypass
00:47:57 ►
any particular spiritual traditions languaging.
00:48:00 ►
And so that’s one researcher that I would look at
00:48:04 ►
that kind of opens the door for saying, hey, wait a minute.
00:48:07 ►
Maybe we really can talk about this stuff scientifically.
00:48:10 ►
It doesn’t mean that we can say this is what enlightenment is, right?
00:48:15 ►
This is just a map.
00:48:17 ►
These are just symbols that we use to represent something.
00:48:20 ►
Just in the same way, you can’t say what depression is.
00:48:23 ►
You can say, well, kind of looks like this in the brain.
00:48:25 ►
People kind of answer these questions in this way.
00:48:28 ►
You can just find some labels, some pointers.
00:48:31 ►
So I don’t claim to know in some absolute sense or have some grand cosmological view of enlightenment.
00:48:39 ►
More that I say as an engineer, I do believe, and it seems from evidence that I’ve seen, that it is possible to
00:48:47 ►
contextualize this like you would any other condition in a scientific framework and to
00:48:52 ►
engineer it using technologies like you would if you were curing the smallpox, if you were curing
00:48:58 ►
smallpox using a vaccine. Yes. So all of these technologies are double-edged swords, like any
00:49:04 ►
technology. So all you can really do is sharpen yourged swords like any technology so all you can really
00:49:06 ►
do is sharpen your edge of the sword as sharp as you can um it’s it’s your only your only option
00:49:12 ►
and i mean or you could sort of pretend like the technology doesn’t exist or try to hide it or
00:49:16 ►
something like that so my approach is um to try to uh to realize that there is this incredible capability to use technology to shift consciousness
00:49:27 ►
and to try to use it in the most fundamentally useful way that I can think of, which I think
00:49:32 ►
is the eradication of human suffering.
00:49:34 ►
Yes?
00:49:37 ►
Yeah.
00:49:38 ►
So what you do see very clearly is a trend in the quantification of our existence, of our reality.
00:49:49 ►
It’s starting quickly, but it’s still fairly small.
00:49:53 ►
It’s tracking your number of steps.
00:49:54 ►
It’s tracking what you eat.
00:49:55 ►
Your phone is recording lots of stuff about what you do, who you talk to, where you go.
00:50:01 ►
Many aspects of your life are starting to become quantified and recorded.
00:50:05 ►
And so it’s very easy to imagine 15 or 20 years down the road, that is going to increase
00:50:10 ►
dramatically.
00:50:11 ►
You’re going to be wearing a patch on your arm that’s going to be recording 50 different
00:50:15 ►
aspects of your, you know, chemical, blood chemical composition and what’s happening
00:50:20 ►
inside your body.
00:50:22 ►
Your phone will have, you know have a dozen or two dozen more sensors
00:50:25 ►
recording things that we can’t even imagine right now. And so pretty soon, you’re talking about
00:50:31 ►
having sort of this increasing model of reality. And what this connects into is a lot of these
00:50:40 ►
ideas in transhumanism, right? Where if you really push this forward,
00:50:47 ►
like really fast forward,
00:50:48 ►
what you’re talking about creating
00:50:50 ►
is essentially a map, a quantification,
00:50:54 ►
a representation of reality, perceivable reality itself.
00:50:58 ►
And the goal, the sort of, I think,
00:51:02 ►
an aspect of the transhumanist vision
00:51:04 ►
is to do just that. The idea
00:51:08 ►
with transhumanism is actually to be able to replicate human consciousness, to create conscious
00:51:14 ►
machines, and to have actually our own consciousness be able to persist in perpetuity in a digital form.
00:51:22 ►
And the only way to do that is to basically rebuild the brain digitally,
00:51:27 ►
to rebuild consciousness digitally, essentially to rebuild reality digitally. So what all this
00:51:33 ►
quantification is leading towards is essentially this effort to create a virtual reality that is
00:51:41 ►
indistinguishable from our own reality where we actually no longer even rely on
00:51:46 ►
the existence of a physical reality, in a sense.
00:51:49 ►
Meaning, in theory, your body could die
00:51:52 ►
and your consciousness would still exist
00:51:55 ►
because it’s perfectly replicated in this digital form.
00:51:59 ►
So that’s this idea.
00:52:01 ►
Now, there is a distinction here
00:52:04 ►
between what I’m pointing towards and what this points
00:52:07 ►
towards. Because if you look at this transhumanist vision, what it’s often really trying to
00:52:13 ►
give infinite longevity to is the ego. It is driven by a fear of death,
00:52:28 ►
ego. It is driven by a fear of death, and it’s driven by a fear that this separate entity inside of us somewhere will die, and we will lose all these things that we are attached to.
00:52:37 ►
Our money, our possessions, our thoughts, our memories, our friends, our family, all of these things. And so the goal actually in this model
00:52:46 ►
is to A, try to use technology in order to allow essentially our egoic selves to live forever,
00:52:53 ►
and B, to have the complete and instantaneous manifestation of all desire.
00:53:01 ►
If you have all of reality in a digital system, the idea is that it can be perfectly
00:53:09 ►
malleable to your own volition, to your own wants and to your own desires. And you can actually
00:53:14 ►
create a reality where desire is instantaneously and completely satisfied. So to contrast with
00:53:22 ►
the vision that I have, the vision that I have is the use of technology to bring people to an experience of absolute and total acceptance of what is now independent of conditions, free of desire.
00:53:41 ►
That’s on one extreme.
00:53:47 ►
free of desire. That’s on one extreme. The complete other extreme is, okay, well, if you can’t do that,
00:53:52 ►
well, then maybe you can completely satisfy every imaginable desire in every possible instant.
00:53:59 ►
And that’s the other extreme. And maybe they meet in the same place. I don’t know. But there are, I would say, complete total opposites. Yes. Oh, cool.
00:54:05 ►
All good questions.
00:54:08 ►
So, yeah, I haven’t,
00:54:11 ►
I think the patenting of experience is interesting.
00:54:14 ►
I think there would definitely be the patenting
00:54:15 ►
of gateways to experience, right?
00:54:19 ►
The sort of the markers,
00:54:20 ►
the neural markers of experience,
00:54:22 ►
like the pleasure center or the enlightenment zone
00:54:24 ►
or whatever it is, and how one can stimulate that. I think that could be patented, um, probably. Um,
00:54:30 ►
but I haven’t, I haven’t talked to the EFF or anything about like that about it. Um, and, uh,
00:54:36 ►
and you were asking about like human augmentation and like non augmented versus non augmented humans.
00:54:41 ►
Yeah. Oh, okay. So this, we’re kind of getting into more of a transhumanist world
00:54:47 ►
because personally I’m not really interested
00:54:50 ►
in human enhancement or augmentation.
00:54:53 ►
I’m not interested in how smart you are,
00:54:55 ►
how fast you can run, how much you can remember.
00:54:59 ►
Even emotionally necessarily exactly what’s happening there.
00:55:04 ►
I’m really interested in something much, much more fundamental.
00:55:09 ►
The very, very root of human suffering,
00:55:12 ►
bringing people to an experience of feeling total acceptance
00:55:16 ►
of what is now in this moment,
00:55:21 ►
independent of what the changing external circumstances might be. We all have
00:55:26 ►
the ability now, regardless of how smart we are, regardless of how good our memory is, regardless
00:55:31 ►
of how much caffeine we’ve had, to experience that sense of contentment and well-being. I’m sure all
00:55:38 ►
of you out on the playa have had those glimpses or those moments out roaming around where you
00:55:43 ►
realize, holy shit, it’s here.
00:55:47 ►
It’s always been here and it always is here.
00:55:50 ►
And so it’s that that I’m pointing to.
00:55:55 ►
So I’m just not so interested in human augmentation in that sense.
00:55:57 ►
And the last thing, because we’re actually, we don’t have that much time.
00:56:03 ►
So in terms of Burning Man projects, I think it would be really cool to do stuff.
00:56:05 ►
I’ve done two Burning Man projects.
00:56:06 ►
I did one last year.
00:56:07 ►
I did one this year. I thought I’d mention them before we run out of time.
00:56:09 ►
So the Burning Man project I did last year was called HeartSync.
00:56:12 ►
And it’s around a theme that I’m really interested in, which is about multi-person synchronization.
00:56:19 ►
How can you use technology to bring a group of people together in order to lower those boundaries, that perceived sense of separateness, and create a feeling of connection, a feeling of sort of an empathic connected feeling between people using some kind of technological interaction?
00:56:41 ►
So my approach to that last year, have you guys ever heard of a technology called
00:56:45 ►
heart math? So heart math is one of the very, very few examples of what I would call a transformative
00:56:52 ►
technology. And that’s sort of the global name we’re giving to this space of technology. It’s
00:56:56 ►
one of the very few examples of it in the consumer marketplace. And what it is, is a device that
00:57:01 ►
essentially measures your heart rate pattern and guides your breath.
00:57:06 ►
And based on the combination of measuring your heart rate and guiding your breath,
00:57:09 ►
it can actually bring your heart into a certain rhythm in relation to your breath that’s very calming for the body and very balanced
00:57:18 ►
and can bring on a lot of heart-centered feelings of love and gratitude if done in the right way.
00:57:23 ►
a lot of heart-centered feelings of love and gratitude, if done in the right way.
00:57:32 ►
And so what I created was a system to guide up to six people to a totally synchronized state of this heart rate variability coherence, where I had this sort of immersive environment that was
00:57:38 ►
this crazy fractal visual crazy thing that I created. And then these intricately controlled sounds, the soundscape with
00:57:47 ►
over 30 different parameters of the sound that were constantly changing. And the visuals and
00:57:51 ►
the sound were in every moment updated and were based on the, not only each individual’s state
00:57:59 ►
of coherence, but also the state of group coherence, the state to which the entire group
00:58:05 ►
had sort of locked into this heart-based rhythm together.
00:58:11 ►
And it was really…
00:58:12 ►
Flora was there. It was really awesome.
00:58:17 ►
And so this was an example of a technology
00:58:21 ►
that I created with this effort in mind
00:58:24 ►
to try to bring a group of people into this state.
00:58:26 ►
The thing that I have on the playa this year,
00:58:28 ►
which maybe you guys can have a chance to try out,
00:58:32 ►
it’s called the heart cart.
00:58:33 ►
And so you can see there’s two chairs over here.
00:58:37 ►
And so two people sit on the chair facing each other.
00:58:40 ►
And then the whole thing closes up over them like a cocoon.
00:58:43 ►
So they’re in this enclosed
00:58:45 ►
space. And each person is feeling the other person’s heartbeat vibrating their body through
00:58:54 ►
a personal subwoofer against their back. So every heartbeat is like this intense body vibration,
00:58:59 ►
but it’s of the other person’s heart. And every time each person breathes, their breath fills the space with sound
00:59:09 ►
and light. And so you are experiencing the other person’s breath as sound and light, and you’re
00:59:16 ►
experiencing the other person’s heart as vibration against your body. And the whole space has, it has
00:59:22 ►
24 different computer- controlled lights all around the
00:59:25 ►
space there’s this whole ambient kind of lighting experience and the idea is um by merging the
00:59:31 ►
physiology together by um breaking down the boundaries of where my body ends and your body
00:59:37 ►
begins and we begin to share our actual biosignals begin to feel each other’s heart, feel each other’s breath,
00:59:46 ►
that you can actually begin to break down that sense of separateness, that sense of self and
00:59:52 ►
other. And you can actually use the technology as a way to foster a sense of personal empathic
00:59:58 ►
connection from one person to the other. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I should have been very clear with that. Yeah. The basic
01:00:09 ►
premise that I’m going off of here is that a, you can understand enlightenment from a scientific
01:00:14 ►
perspective that it can be quantified. It could be understood in terms of the brain, in terms of
01:00:18 ►
psychology, physiology, behavior. And from that, a map essentially, from that ability to basically quantify what
01:00:27 ►
enlightenment is, that you can engineer it.
01:00:31 ►
And not only do I believe that, but that work is still, is now well underway.
01:00:34 ►
So there are great steps forward in terms of understanding what enlightenment looks
01:00:39 ►
like in the brain.
01:00:40 ►
And there are a number of interesting technologies that are already emerging that seem to be pointing towards this as being not just some distant possibility, but I actually believe in the next 10 years or less that you will see technologies that exist that can very rapidly transition people into a persistent shift in their experience, something that you would have needed to spend 10 years in a cave meditating otherwise. And I think there’s a lot of important concerns here.
01:01:10 ►
This isn’t just some panacea that somehow magically solves everything. You still have
01:01:15 ►
reality and context to deal with. You have all these interesting questions such as like, well,
01:01:20 ►
if all of a sudden you have this machine and I sit down, I put this helmet on or something like
01:01:24 ►
that, and then poof, something changes, the enlightenment button, which I think is possible, how do you contextualize that?
01:01:33 ►
Right?
01:01:33 ►
Because that contextualization seems to be very important.
01:01:37 ►
That essentially is almost like the religious structures that a lot of people use to guide their experience.
01:01:42 ►
If you don’t contextualize,
01:01:47 ►
that can also lead to really interesting problems and confusion about the experience.
01:01:49 ►
So then, in a sense, you’ve come into the business
01:01:51 ►
of creating a sort of science-based religion of sorts, potentially,
01:01:54 ►
where it’s like, well, the guy in the lab coat is your new guru,
01:01:57 ►
and your god are these equations, or something like that.
01:02:01 ►
So you have to think along those lines.
01:02:04 ►
And, of course, you have to think in terms of what’s safe
01:02:08 ►
just for the human system, right?
01:02:12 ►
You can’t overload the physiology.
01:02:13 ►
You can’t overload the energetic system.
01:02:15 ►
So those things, of course, have to be taken into consideration.
01:02:18 ►
Yeah.
01:02:20 ►
They haven’t really.
01:02:22 ►
The best technologies are still the the traditional
01:02:26 ►
technologies unfortunately um i i believe that we will surpass in certain ways traditional
01:02:33 ►
tools with technologies i’m not looking to like replace traditional tools i think there’s a place
01:02:39 ►
for everything actually i think that the more paths that exist the better um we should just
01:02:43 ►
have a million efforts from every imaginable direction to shift human consciousness.
01:02:49 ►
But, yeah, right now there’s a couple products that you guys can check out that are pretty cool.
01:02:54 ►
One is the HeartMath device.
01:02:56 ►
It’s called the M-Wave.
01:02:58 ►
And the other is a device from a company called Interaxon.
01:03:01 ►
And it’s a wearable EEG called the Muse.
01:03:04 ►
And it measures your brain
01:03:05 ►
and has a really nice meditation feedback algorithm,
01:03:09 ►
and it basically plays sounds, ambient sounds,
01:03:12 ►
to guide you into a deeper state of meditation.
01:03:14 ►
So those are just a couple of the interesting technologies
01:03:16 ►
that are out there.
01:03:18 ►
Muse, M-U-S-E, yeah.
01:03:21 ►
It seems somehow a fundamental aspect of our human nature to perpetuate our own suffering.
01:03:31 ►
And I don’t think that that will change.
01:03:34 ►
And so this, even though it seems like somehow fundamentally different technology from meditation or something,
01:03:41 ►
it’s not. It’s the same thing.
01:03:42 ►
Just because it may be more efficient, it may be more accessible, but the same barriers that people have to breaking down their own
01:03:53 ►
belief structures and belief systems that keep them from feeling good, those will still remain.
01:04:01 ►
And so, of course, there will be people that will probably uprise and protest against the technologies.
01:04:06 ►
I would imagine some of the technologies might be made illegal.
01:04:09 ►
I think there could be actual real cultural revolution
01:04:12 ►
as social structures change,
01:04:15 ►
if the technologies do become more ubiquitous.
01:04:17 ►
I think it would be actually,
01:04:20 ►
if these technologies become available,
01:04:22 ►
could be, A, I think that they would be one of the most desirable
01:04:26 ►
forms of technology on the planet
01:04:28 ►
because you’re talking about tools that can directly
01:04:30 ►
address human suffering
01:04:31 ►
and B, I think it would be one of the most transformative
01:04:34 ►
technologies to ever affect human society
01:04:36 ►
because it would so deeply affect
01:04:38 ►
human consciousness
01:04:39 ►
and
01:04:41 ►
in terms of form factor that these technologies
01:04:44 ►
will come in,
01:04:45 ►
I guarantee you gaming will be a primary one.
01:04:49 ►
There are some interesting tools that are sometimes used for various,
01:04:57 ►
like autism and other conditions that are addressed by clinical neurofeedback.
01:05:02 ►
But nothing’s really used to this extent
01:05:05 ►
that we’re talking about, as far as I know.
01:05:08 ►
But there is a whole world of clinical neurofeedback out there.
01:05:11 ►
It’s been around for 50 or more years.
01:05:13 ►
There’s stuff that now that I’ve seen,
01:05:15 ►
it’s not clinical.
01:05:17 ►
Yeah, I’m not sure.
01:05:18 ►
I mean, I’ve seen a lot of these.
01:05:18 ►
I’m not sure exactly which one you’re talking about.
01:05:20 ►
But the short answer is gaming is an incredible tool
01:05:24 ►
that we can use as a
01:05:26 ►
form of feedback and a conduit. So I think you’re going to see all kinds of games emerging
01:05:30 ►
that center around neurofeedback, biofeedback, and shifting human experience. But I think
01:05:36 ►
we’ve got to end, right? Okay. So I think we’ve got to end. So I’m happy to answer any
01:05:41 ►
questions after. Thank you all so much for joining me.
01:05:52 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:05:55 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:06:00 ►
If you have the time right now,
01:06:01 ►
you may find it interesting to watch the TED Talk that Mikey gave just a few months before the talk that you and I just listened to.
01:06:09 ►
The visuals that he uses to illustrate that talk are really worth a look, and I’ll link to it in our program notes.
01:06:16 ►
I really like Mikey’s concept for audio feedback of brain states,
01:06:20 ►
and the thought that perhaps I could become fluent in the soundtrack of my mind,
01:06:25 ►
as he said, really attracts me.
01:06:29 ►
But at times, I’m sure that my mind would sound like headbanger music, if you know what
01:06:34 ►
I mean.
01:06:35 ►
Now, I agree with a lot of thoughtful people that I wouldn’t want to upload my consciousness
01:06:41 ►
into silicone.
01:06:43 ►
But I also don’t believe that such a technology
01:06:46 ►
is anywhere close to being real, in fact, if it could even be developed. And I think that I’ve
01:06:52 ►
spoken about that before. So I’ll let you come to your own conclusions about it once you’ve
01:06:56 ►
seriously thought through all of the implications of such a thing. And, I should say, after you’ve
01:07:03 ►
read Greg Egan’s excellent book, Permutation City.
01:07:07 ►
And that’s a really great book, by the way,
01:07:09 ►
and if you are interested at all in upgrading consciousness into,
01:07:13 ►
or I should say, uploading consciousness into silicone,
01:07:16 ►
then this book is not only must-reading,
01:07:18 ►
it probably should be your starting point to think about these things.
01:07:22 ►
Now, that said, I’m also well aware of the fact that
01:07:26 ►
we humans are evolving along with our technology almost without noticing it. So while I may not
01:07:32 ►
think uploading consciousness into silicone is a good idea, who knows what humans will be thinking
01:07:37 ►
500 years from now. I’m quite sure that if one of your ancestors from 500 years ago hung around with you for a week,
01:07:48 ►
well, they’d probably be glad to have missed all this.
01:07:55 ►
But as Bruce Dahmer once said, to some extent, the future is being made around us.
01:07:59 ►
Which is why it is so very important for everyone today.
01:08:04 ►
Everyone. Not just those wizards who are developing our new tech, but all of us.
01:08:06 ►
Particularly us users.
01:08:13 ►
It’s up to each and every one of us to voice our opinions about the directions that we want our new technology to follow,
01:08:17 ►
and we’re responsible as well for how we use this tech.
01:08:29 ►
In the past, I’ve already pointed out how distasteful I find it to see parents sitting in the park looking at their phones rather than watching their children play. And kids notice these things, even if they don’t say anything to you about it. And even if you’ve given them a phone of their own to use, they still
01:08:35 ►
most definitely notice when your attention is directed at your hand rather than at them. And
01:08:41 ►
in effect, that little piece of technology in your hand has enslaved you.
01:08:47 ►
As Terence McKenna once said,
01:08:49 ►
If we could raise to consciousness our alchemical heritage and our heritage in the shamanism
01:09:00 ►
of the archaic, then we could actually see that the purpose of technology is to liberate,
01:09:10 ►
not to enslave. And somehow we’ve lost the thread. Technology is not being used to liberate.
01:09:18 ►
It’s being used to enslave. That soundbite, by the way, is from podcast 226, which is part four of his Hermeticism
01:09:29 ►
and Alchemy series. Now, the biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that what actually made us human
01:09:35 ►
is technology. In an interview, he once said, it can be summed up in Kenneth Oakley’s definition 50 years ago that man may be distinguished as the tool-making primate.
01:09:49 ►
Once our ancient ancestors figured out how to manipulate the natural world, tool-making made us human.
01:09:57 ►
And in my opinion, tool-makers like Mikey Siegel and his associates are tool-makers extraordinaire.
01:10:03 ►
I had to, I really had to smile
01:10:06 ►
when early on in the talk that we just listened to, Mikey said that he was a somewhat traditional
01:10:12 ►
engineer. Well, I’m an electrical engineer myself, and I paid my way through law school working as
01:10:18 ►
an engineer, a traditional engineer. I designed motor control centers and electric heat tracing systems.
01:10:27 ►
And actually, I guess about the coolest thing that I ever did as an engineer, and this isn’t
01:10:31 ►
very cool, was to figure out how to keep the peanut butter hot and flowing through the pipes
01:10:37 ►
at the Quaker Oats plant where they were trying to make peanut butter crunch. At the time, I had
01:10:43 ►
small children and they were very impressed.
01:10:46 ►
With a thank you letter to me.
01:10:49 ►
From Captain Crunch on his official stationery.
01:10:50 ►
Now that.
01:10:53 ►
That’s a traditional engineer.
01:10:55 ►
Mike and his friends. Are on a whole other planet.
01:10:57 ►
From us traditional engineers.
01:10:59 ►
And so my advice.
01:11:00 ►
To any young salonner out there.
01:11:02 ►
Thinking about going into engineering.
01:11:04 ►
Stay away from traditional engineering.
01:11:07 ►
Head out here to the coast and figure out how to become involved in, well,
01:11:11 ►
what I guess I’m now going to have to begin thinking of as maybe the new normal for traditional engineering.
01:11:17 ►
Anyhow, one last thought and I’ll let you go.
01:11:20 ►
It has to do with technology, the talk that we just listened to, gaming, and sports.
01:11:27 ►
You see, on Saturday I was looking through the listing of live Periscope feeds,
01:11:32 ►
and I noticed one that said it was a conversation with the fastest man in the world.
01:11:36 ►
So I checked it out, and actually it was a conversation with Usain Bolt,
01:11:41 ►
who may actually be the fastest person ever.
01:11:44 ►
And he was driving his car through the streets of Jamaica
01:11:47 ►
while someone in the passenger seat periscoped their conversation.
01:11:52 ►
So, now you’ve got the technology part and the sports part,
01:11:55 ►
what about today’s talk?
01:11:58 ►
Well, a few moments ago, we heard Mikey Siegel say how important he thought
01:12:02 ►
gaming was going to be to our species’ future evolution.
01:12:07 ►
And what do you think Hussein wanted to talk about most?
01:12:11 ►
It was gaming.
01:12:12 ►
He’s a really avid gamer, and the most exciting thing he is looking forward to this year
01:12:17 ►
is the release this coming November of the next edition of his favorite game.
01:12:22 ►
Now, I see a lot of significance in this from several directions,
01:12:27 ►
but maybe it’s just me.
01:12:29 ►
So, I’m going to let you think about all that for yourself right now,
01:12:32 ►
and get out of here too.
01:12:33 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:12:38 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.