Vince and Emily Horn of Buddhist Geeks—a fusion of Buddhism, tech, and modern culture—debate whether meditation apps like Buddhify (Emily’s project) can replace traditional practice, with Vince arguing "space has the upper hand." They explore transhumanism through an Australian man’s carbon-fiber limbs, questioning if consciousness survives in artificial substrates, citing Buddhist karma and Whitehead’s prehension. Rogan’s floatation tanks and psychedelics contrast with their emphasis on embodied wisdom, not escape. The duo’s Naropa-inspired work, including fMRI studies of advanced meditators like David Vago, reveals the brain’s "selfing network" but warns against spiritual bypassing. Their Dojo project aims to blend VR and mindfulness for 21st-century growth, balancing enlightenment with daily life—like parenting or relationships—without dogma. [Automatically generated summary]
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Also, because when I put on reading glasses, things just get sharper.
I'm like, oh, that's what things really look like.
You know, like, I could read everything without the glasses, but then when I put them on, I see, like, if you look at pages, you can see the actual detail, the texture, and the paper itself.
Well, we started several years ago as a podcast doing this kind of thing, talking to people.
And really in the beginning, it was just my sort of early 20s rebellion against the Buddhist tradition.
And I wanted to talk to people that weren't part of the mainstream Buddhist world, but had something cool to say, I thought.
So we just basically started by talking to some different rebels, a lot of Gen Xers who were kind of coming up as teachers and meditation experts or masters.
And it sort of started there just as a kind of whim project with a couple friends.
And then people responded, so we kept doing it.
And we felt a sort of obligation to continue exploring Buddhism, technology, culture, the way it's globalizing.
And we just sort of from there have just been on a sort of I love it.
I think it's like most religions, you know, there's some aspect of just rebelling against people telling you what to do or the feeling that, you know, this system of beliefs is telling you how to live or what to do with your life.
I think that's part of it is just kind of breaking apart dogmatic structures and sort of saying, hey, actually, we can make this our own and figure out how to do it ourselves because we're the ones that are interested in it.
So we have to sort of take ownership of that.
And so there's a bit of like, I guess, generational...
Pushback, you know, and saying, actually, we don't want to meditate like the hippies did.
You know, we don't want lotus flowers and incense.
You know, we want like our computer screens and meditation apps.
You know, we want to do it the way it makes sense to us.
Are there like some recommended meditation apps that are better than traditional forms of meditation or an alternative, I should say, to traditional forms of meditation?
Yeah, I've wrote a couple for working on the computer.
So it's really just about trying to bridge what we're doing already in our lives with meditation practice and these ancient traditions that have come down.
The Buddha-Fi is the app and then the couple of meditations that I wrote, it's just simple things like bringing your attention to different kind of anchor points.
For example, you know, we all usually have some sort of touch screen mobile device.
And so, you know, you can use it to bring your attention back as you swipe it, you know, back and forth with your finger.
So it's just something, you know, very simple to return to so that, you know, consciousness and the mind can start to just kind of settle so that you know you're more aware.
And by being more aware, it makes a lot of difference.
It's a fascination with social interaction, right?
That's what it is.
It's this thing where, you know, I read this piece that was talking about the origins of gossip and what gossip is all about and why so many people are into celebrities and celebrity gossip, the Kim Kardashian stuff and that kind of thing.
And the big thing being that our culture doesn't have the same sort of communities that it once had.
These tribal bonds that expanded from 50 to 150 people to cities of 30 million.
They're very confusing for our biology, apparently.
I mean, I read a great article that said, in some sense, Facebook brought that experience of living in a tribal village back as a technology, kind of a la Marshall McLuhan and his whole sort of theory about every technology brings something back from the past.
We're making computers and we keep making better ones.
We're essentially the evolutionary device that causes the things that we've created to accelerate far quicker and innovate far quicker than biology ever has a chance to.
And in the process, we're also, seemingly at least, on the verge of creating some sort of an artificial biological life.
Whether it's biological, I mean, I don't know what you call artificially created cells that interact with each other the same way human cells do, but we're pretty goddamn close.
Whether it's 100 years or 200 years, pretty close to making artificial people.
And where's that coming from?
It's coming from people.
I mean, if they are machines, biological machines, McClellan will be right.
And then a new life form will be birthed out of our greasy little hands.
I saw Elon Musk on Twitter a couple days ago said, increasingly, looks like we're going to be the biological bootloaders for digital superintelligence.
There's a bunch of people that don't believe that's happening.
I read this interesting article on Kurzweil.
The guy was very critical of Kurzweil.
And he was...
I think this guy's sort of...
He's a curmudgeon a bit.
He's an intelligent guy, but his criticism of Kurzweil was basically a biological criticism that our understanding of the human mind is already...
It's fairly limited in terms of like how the human mind processes various hormones and neurotransmitters and proteins and that there's no way we'll be able to recreate that because our ideas of the human mind, the biological mind, are still constantly evolving and changing and growing and that we're not really ready yet to duplicate the human mind.
But my take on that was that we don't have to duplicate the biological functions of it to duplicate the actual functions of it.
Because if they figured out a way to make something that not only mimics the memory banks or the memory access of the human mind, but is much better than that and does it in a completely different way, a non-biological way, and they can figure out a way to download intelligence or download consciousness or memories into that bank, Well, we're not going to really need this whole idea of cells and proteins.
Those are the components of the biological machine.
But if we can make a better version of that and do it like some sort of a synthetic version or some sort of an artificially created version, it doesn't seem to me that we're going to need to know everything about the human mind in order to recreate its processes, right?
Yeah, and I think it's also interesting to see, just bringing a little bit of the feminine perspective, and it's like, I'm very conscious of like, you know, childbirth and some of these, you know, natural things that are on my mind a lot.
And so thinking about merging with technology or creating some sort of artificial intelligence, it seems to me that a lot of these conversations start to navigate really quickly towards getting out of the body.
And so I, you know, wonder if there is some sort of bridge between, you know, we're going to create something new and at the same time, like you were saying, like infusing that with wisdom and compassion and some of these biological processes.
Are we ever really going to get out of that?
I don't know.
It's just an underlying assumption a lot in these conversations that I think is interesting.
Yeah, it's fascinating because the general idea of the human body and the needs of the body, whether they're the needs for food or the need for the human touch or the need to breed, all these different things will be completely unnecessary if we're no longer biological.
And what is causing war?
What is causing greed?
What is causing jealousy?
Are these ancient monkey ideas that are stuck in our genetics, these mechanisms that have sort of forced us into the future?
They forced competition.
They forced us to cope and adapt.
They forced us to learn to interact with each other.
And along the way, we've sort of developed these methods for managing the biology and meditation being one of them.
Meditation and mindfulness and trying to be centered and being the present has sort of...
It emerged because so many people are like, wow, my fucking head's all over the place.
Hey, this is what I've learned.
If you just do this and say, this is where I am, this is what I'm doing.
All that other stuff is nonsense.
I concentrate on this, and this I can get things done with.
But if I... Live in the past and worry about all the mistakes that I've made and allow them to define them, allow them to define me rather, they can be very limiting and they can really ruin your perceptions in a sense or flavor your perceptions in a very unsatisfactory or very unwelcome way where your day can be burdened by the past.
Or you could be in the...
All these things are sort of designed to allow us to navigate the biological waters, right?
To figure out what is the push and pull of this machine?
Like, why is this machine jealous?
Like, what's going on here?
Why does this want me to be upset at someone else's success?
Why does this want me to be upset that someone is attracted to someone else other than me?
Why does this want me to be upset at someone else's house or someone else's...
You know, family or whatever it is that is tweaking you.
What's going on in here?
Well, it's the machine wants competition because the machine has gotten you to 2014, where a million years ago a monkey crawled out of a hole and figured out a way to draw an arrow that points towards where the food is, the other monkeys live.
Oh, that way?
You could go like, oh, I see what you're doing.
And then those ideas compiled and they piled on to other ideas and before you know it, a million years later we have a civilization, a complex civilization that has all these different influences that have led us to this point.
But a lot of them are biological.
A lot of the very motivations for doing most of what people do on a daily basis are very biological.
When those are eliminated, it becomes a real question of like, what's life?
What exactly are we?
And if we reproduce through test tubes or whatever the hell it's going to be, when we become 3D printers or whatever it's going to be, when we become biological copies or artificial biology, what are we?
One thing I thought was interesting as I got into the transhumanist stuff, you know, a while back was that, you know, they use this term mind uploading, you know, to kind of predict, you know, we'd be able to upload our consciousness into the cloud and stuff like that.
But I thought it was interesting that later, I realized they never then use the term body downloading.
So why is it that you can upload your mind to the cloud, but you can't then download your consciousness back into different kinds of bodies?
And I think it speaks a little bit to what Emily's saying, that there's a lot of the shadow of the geek culture is a disdain for the physical body and a disdain for limitations, which I totally understand because I think there's part of us that wants to transcend the limits of being human.
And it's the same thing that drives the Buddhist meditators to seek for enlightenment.
It's to realize this thing which is beyond, in some sense, the limitations of the human experience.
And yet, you know, the real mature expression or realization in the Buddhist tradition is to realize that and then to return back into your incarnated physical form and to fully inhabit it.
So I hope that the transhumanists and the folks that are building these seeds of digital superintelligence realize that even if we're able to upload our patterns into the cloud, we still, if they're still beings who have a sense of themselves and have some sort of physical if they're still beings who have a sense of themselves and have
whether it's carbon or silicon, That they're still going to have to deal with certain issues of incarnation, of being in a form, a physical form of some sort, even if it's a very loose, digital, very fast flickering form.
There's still something there and there's still some sort of reference point.
And I think that's where the Buddhist tradition has something to say, even about superintelligence and what that experience would be like.
Because as long as there's a form, and as long as there's an identity, right, like a reference point, a me, then there's going to be certain kinds of issues that we can't get rid of.
Like, then I have to deal with you, and I have to deal with these other yous.
And then there's things or objects outside of me, and some of them I want, and some of them I don't want, and some of them I'm just going to ignore.
And so even if I were a super intelligent consciousness, which I can't imagine because my imagination is so limited, I still think there will be some amount of fundamental dissatisfaction that's built into the experience of being an individual who has a reference point.
And I think that's in some sense what the Buddhist path is about seeing clearly, is that most of our existential suffering and despair comes from This fundamental experience of being a separate being who exists on this side of my body.
I mean, if you really stop and think about true enlightenment and being completely in the moment, doesn't that exist in the animal kingdom exclusively?
I mean, that's the only way they exist.
They exist completely in the moment.
And in a sense, that is the most biological of all creatures.
And that's a creature that has no existential issues.
They don't have any angst in terms of their future, their past.
They live and exist completely in the moment.
So isn't it just our awareness of the futility of this existence that's part of the problem?
Because along the way, we're innovating, we're expanding, we're growing, we're doing all these different things, we're Going to biohacking conferences and whatever the hell you're doing.
But at the end of the day, you live and you die.
You have a very short window here.
And it's like, what are you supposed to be doing?
Are you supposed to be enjoying it?
Are you supposed to be leaving it better for the people that come after you?
And what's their purpose?
Why leave it better for them?
And what are they doing?
They're just leaving it better for the next?
And at the end of the day, what are we doing?
We're just enhancing this Giant superorganism known as the human race.
And for what purpose?
Because we're helping it pollute?
Because we want more planes in the sky?
We want better cell phones?
The existential angst of being conscious, of being able to recognize that this is kind of...
At the end of the day, this is just a weird little trip you're on.
You're on a birth-to-death trip and...
If you become something that's not human, if you become something that's not burdened by biology, it's not burdened by sexual urges or any of the petty urges of modern human life that we all struggle with, what exactly are you here for?
What exactly is going on?
And motivation might be the number one problem.
With artificial intelligence.
It might not even be compassion.
It might be that artificial intelligence It becomes so intelligent that it's like, we're not doing shit.
I'm not doing nothing.
Why would I do anything?
Why would I expand?
Why would I move on?
Why would I make more of me?
Why would I do anything?
Why would I explore galaxies?
I don't even have ovaries.
I don't have a mind.
I don't have a sense of futility.
I don't have a beginning and an end.
I can make another one of me with a button.
What am I doing?
Am I going to go see the top of the Grand Canyon?
For what?
For what purpose?
What am I going to do?
I'm going to fly in a plane and go to Paris?
Why?
What do I give a shit?
I don't have any desire to learn.
There's no urge to improve and innovate.
I'm not biological anymore.
What has created everything that we have?
Everything that we have, every building that we've ever made, every work of art that we've ever created, is essentially this thing inside human beings that wants us to innovate and create.
This thing that has allowed us to radically reshape our environment, that has allowed us to design cities and buildings Pieces and pieces of art and pieces of architecture and all these different things that we've created has all come from that same desire, that desire to continually improve.
But if the human body, if we transcend it with some sort of an artificial creation and we become far more enlightened and intelligent, the ultimate question will be why?
Because, you know, when I'm listening to you talk about this, I'm like, huh, there's a part of me that's like, no, like, let's not do that!
And then there's this other part of me that's like, yeah, that desire to create and that desire to move forward and the evolutionary, like, impulse in us all is so strong.
And that's what makes us so beautiful.
And so when I really touch into the mystery of it all and the beauty and the wonder and what you're talking about with the art, to me, it's like not such a question of trying to get out of this anymore.
It's more like a question of how can we use these technologies and the things that we are learning through science and the natural laws of things Because honestly, if we start to violate much more of our natural laws, our oceans are going to rebel and our Earth is going to become unstable, and we're seeing some of that.
So we do have to balance the biological component with the evolutionary impulse.
And one thing that comes to my mind is philosopher Ken Wilber talks about transcend and include a lot.
So what if, you know, part of what we're doing is learning how to transcend some of our limitations as human beings and at the same time include some of those limitations?
We have this consistent, constant need for improvement, and that is essentially designed into the evolutionary process itself.
That's what led single-celled organisms to divide.
Become multi-celled organisms to get out of the ocean, to seek land, to seek shelter, to seek improvements in altering its environment in order to protect itself from predators, which led us to the 21st century, to where we are today, having this conversation.
That somehow, I don't know if you understand it, but I don't understand how my voice is being processed down into ones and zeros and pumped through the sky and people are getting it on their phone right now as they're driving in their car.
This is madness.
This is a mad, mad, mad world.
And what's the urge behind all of it?
Well, it's this biological need.
For innovation, this biological need for constant improvement.
And it's designed in the evolutionary process itself.
I mean, it's a part of the evolutionary process.
I mean, why do animals evolve?
Why don't they just say, fuck it, if these fish keep grabbing us, let's just stay the same color and go extinct.
No.
Bugs, you know, they start...
Like, have you seen...
Caterpillars that look like predators, they develop eyes on their backs so that they can look scary, so that less animals eat them, or at least they've gotten to that point where that design...
I mean, I don't know how you can ever really truly completely explain some of these butterflies that have these elaborate images that have sort of emerged throughout, I mean, how many hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution, but it's incredibly fascinating that they've...
We've developed this need to figure out how to trick animals so they can continue to breed.
They've improved.
They've innovated.
If you could really talk to a butterfly and go, listen, dude, you only live a week.
What do you care?
If you die or your relatives die, what kind of a bullshit life is this?
You know, you live a week you fly around people go ooh look at the butterfly and then it's over like let a bunch of lizards you Let's just get this over with let's you know come back as a better bug Figure out how to exist as a microbe inside the body of the animals that are eating you and then Develop from its poop into some magical plant that enlightens the people that eat it or something But living as a butterfly is bullshit But they don't think that way.
It's part of this process.
Continue to innovate.
Constantly push forward.
Make things better.
If we stop being biological...
Does everything just stop?
What is the conversation then?
If you don't have a motivation, if you don't have an expiration date, if you don't have people's sexual choices to appeal to, if you don't have people's social choices to appeal to, if you don't want people to like you, if you don't have any desire biologically, what's the motivation?
Well, I mean, obviously this is highly speculative in a way, but...
Maybe I'd just throw in one piece and kind of bring it back down to the analog version of intelligence, which is these human bodies sitting here having this conversation, if that's okay with you.
I'd say there's another piece that's really important in what you're saying.
There is the drive to innovate and to transcend, but then I think there's also a very powerful force that moves in the other direction and I would call it compassion or care or love and it's that part of us that wants to include everything like Emily mentioned transcending and including you know we can become better and better and better but what good is it if everyone else is left behind you know what good is it if we're you know living living the high life and there
are millions of people who are struggling to feed themselves At some level, when we get in touch with the reality of that, there's part of us, if our hearts are open, that really resonates with the pain of that and wants to include and wants to respond to that suffering and to that difficulty.
And I think that's part of the reason life exists as well.
It's one of the primary reasons.
It's not just to transcend, but it's also to care for and to respond to the needs of others because we realized it's not just about us.
It's not just this experience that's important.
There are all these others that are also having an experience and they're not unlike me.
And that's why compassion can exist because I realized Your experience is not unlike my experience.
There's a way in which we have this common hardware, wetware, this common sense of consciousness, I assume, this common hopes and fears, desires.
And so in that sense, I think compassion is a really powerful force that also holds life together and keeps it from flinging apart into the ethers.
But the cynical and objective amongst us would look at that and say, well, that's just a mechanism in order to keep society together to allow this consistent innovation.
You need people to stay together in order to get people to work together in order to get the maximum amount of productivity out of the human mind and creativity.
I mean, there's only one way.
They have to love each other.
If they don't love each other, they're not going to build shit.
They're going to go live like Ted Kaczynski and hide up in the woods in a little shack and try to stay away from each other as much as possible.
Part of the reason why we do so well is because we have compassion.
It could certainly be considered an evolutionary device to ensure innovation and constant growth.
And it has.
I mean, every society that has done well has been a society that cherished its members.
If you don't give a fuck about your members, you get a North Korea-type situation.
Where there's no innovation, the country's stagnant, everyone lives in fear, the lights are off at night, and that's a worst case scenario for a modern culture, and that is based almost entirely on those same ideas.
The lack of compassion for your fellow beings Exhibited, like, if you looked at the one thing, or you asked people, what's the one thing that troubles you most about a brutal dictatorship like North Korea?
Well, the poor people that live there.
The poor people that are suffering that live there.
Our compassion is a part of what makes us, it's a component, a critical component, which makes us successful.
Yeah, and I think, you know, you can look at it from that perspective, but I think there's other ways to look at it, which is that compassion in and of itself is a good thing.
You know, that there's something inherent in the experience of compassion, of the open heart that's responding to suffering, which is in itself good.
And that, you know, when you experience and touch into that space, which completely dissolves cynicism in the moment of it, there is this feeling of this is right.
Like, this is right to respond to the difficulty of other beings, because on some fundamental level, we aren't separate from each other.
And in some fundamental way, the level of the universe itself.
You know, everything arose out of this momentary Big Bang, right?
That's our current story about it.
Like, okay, what the fuck was that?
What was that that it all came from?
This nothing, this infinitely small point in space.
Actually, you know, the Big Bang isn't something that happened in the past.
It's something that is happening right now.
It's something that which was prior to the universe is still here.
And that is also our nature.
And that nature is naturally compassionate.
It naturally responds.
It naturally includes everything.
So I think there's something in us that also wants to reunite with our own deepest...
Because if that's the case, then how do you factor in predators?
How do you factor in the constant competition in the wild that exists everywhere?
Compassion really only exists when there's safety.
It's the only time it exists when, you know, when you worry about your own existence constantly.
It's like this rabid sort of primal struggle when all that is put to rest and you build up walls and you have a fire and you can hold each other and everyone's together and fine.
Then there's the room and need for compassion.
But with the eagle and the fish, there's no compassion.
Yeah, that's where the cynic would say that the whole reason for that is so that these humans can breed and make more humans who figure out a way to make a better electric car, who figure out a way to make a wormhole.
It also reminds me of science and the mirror neurons, too, because we're learning that we're mirroring each other and what you're doing is affecting me and what I'm doing is affecting you.
And it's rewiring our brains as we're talking.
So in that sense, we really are so connected that we don't even realize how connected we are.
So, in a sense, yeah, it is one of the most important things.
And it's fascinating when you see people change the people that they hang around with, and they all of a sudden improve or regress.
And that's a consistent pattern with human beings.
You find a really good group of friends who are super healthy and like to do a lot of exciting, fun things, and they're compassionate to each other, and you start mimicking that behavior, or at least mirroring that behavior.
So we don't have to be ruled by our biological desires.
So when you're saying, like, greed and hatred and competition and all that, then, I mean, maybe that is where we are at a certain point, and some of us are, and with evolutionary drive to continue to create and open and really deepen into what some of the Western traditions have been talking about, then, you know, it's possible to, like, I don't know, evolve ourselves as we're even talking here.
So it's sort of like, we can only imagine what it would be like not to be like we are, but it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be something that has not yet emerged.
So maybe we could have a follow-up interview when we've all attained super intelligence.
That, to me, seems more likely than any of those other scenarios.
I wonder what the next step is.
I've stopped many times and I've spent entire days thinking about...
A thousand years from today to a thousand years from now.
Like, what is the difference?
And what is the difference going to be?
And how radical is it going to be?
How radical is the shift?
And I really have a feeling that it's going to have nothing to do with the body and all to do with the mind.
And I think that this idea of transcending the human body and I have a feeling they're gonna figure out some way that the human mind can access other states, dimensions, levels of consciousness that literally the human body will be irrelevant.
Are you opening up the floodgates for human neurotransmitters and the body's ability to process them gets skewed and it presents you with all sorts of...
You know, delusional beliefs and crazy visions because your visual cortex can't process all these chemicals correctly, so you have this wild, fantastic ride.
It gives you this sense of euphoria and this elated sense of being.
But then there's also the perspective of consciousness itself, you know, of the experiential aspect of it, which is, I think, also part of the challenge...
Of our moment in time, I think, is starting to recognize that both of these perspectives are valid, that the perspective of consciousness of experience is also valid.
So, from the perspective of consciousness, you know, Those altered states of experience reveal something valid.
Now, whether or not we can, from that point of view, describe the biology of it, I think it's clear we can't.
And so it's useful to have a description of, like, this is what's happening in the brain, these areas are deafferentiating, and then these areas are lighting up, and all that stuff.
Because, you know, we're having thoughts about brains.
And the only way brains exist is through our internal representations of brains and in terms of human consciousness.
So I think, you know, that'd be the other perspective is like consciousness itself is also a valid perspective on this.
And from that point of view, you know, those moments of altered experience of, like, compassion, like you described, when, you know, you realized you helped the person in Asheville and were there for him, or, you know, when your child's born, or when you, you know, take a hallucinogenic approach, Medicine with the intention of learning more about your, you know, your deepest nature or something about yourself or going on a meditation retreat and exploring your experience moment by moment.
I think those things reveal very important truths that are at the level of consciousness itself that, you know, you can't convince a skeptic or a That they're true, but you can give them the instructions and say, hey, run this program and see what happens.
And if you do it with a certain kind of intention, then it changes your life.
It changes your perspective.
It changes your sense of who you are and what this is all about.
And I appreciate that you're pointing out the one side of it, which is that...
Yeah, this is a limited trip.
We don't really know what the hell's happening here.
We don't know how we got into this body.
At least I don't remember how I got into this body.
And then we're going to die at some point, and we don't know when.
That's the other thing.
We know we're going to die, but we don't know when.
We don't know how.
We don't know how long from now.
And so there is a certain kind of in-your-face situation I think we're constantly coping with as human beings.
And compassion can be a way to cope with that and love.
There's a term that this Tibetan master used who came to America in the 70s named Chagyam Trungpa, and he said, there's compassion and then there's idiot compassion.
And idiot compassion is when you are trying to respond to suffering because you can't handle it, because you can't actually deal with it.
So you try to make it go away, or you try to, oh, poor you, poor you, that kind of compassion.
So compassion can just as easily be a way to cope with the shocking reality that we don't know what's even going to happen next, let alone what's going to happen in 50 to 100 years from now.
I always felt like compassion was just the way that we kept together, that we kept our love for each other and bonds, and that feeling other people's pain is a way to ensure that we minimize that as much as possible, that it's just sort of part of the biological process,
especially the biological process of transcending the simple monkey mind and moving into some new state, the ability to understand each other, communicate, express information, and also To be able to conceptualize very bizarre ideas that human beings have kind of based their entire society on.
We based our society on bizarre things like laws, regulations, money.
The bandwidth, you know, there's weird concepts that we have had to factor in to our view of the world, the environment, our interaction with that environment, our effect on that environment, how much can we mitigate that?
How much is just a necessary evil to maintain our wonderful existence with air conditioning and high-speed internet?
I mean, what are those thoughts?
Where are those things going?
And how much of those are connected to, again, the same thing, this constant need to stay together, help each other innovate, help each other move forward, press forward, and continue to grow?
And is something like Buddhism or Transcendental Meditation or anything, are these just sort of like ways to get through this in a relatively sane way?
Are these essentially man-created technologies, human-created technologies to mitigate the natural world?
I mean, because humans sat under trees, you know, in India, 2500 years ago, thousands of years ago, and explored their own minds and did come up with various, you know, programs for how to work with experience.
Isn't that fascinating that someone a long time ago was looking around at people hacking each other to death of swords and was like, you know, there's got to be a way around some of this shit.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's crazy too that people figured out how to pay attention and use their body in a way to produce some of those effects endogenously, you know, to be able to experience that even without mushrooms, you know, to be able to get into those kind of states of consciousness and even to stabilize them, you know, as a kind of baseline of existence.
Well, kundalini masters, people that are really good at kundalini, I have a friend who teaches it and he says that he can reach these complete psychedelic states where he's interacting with beings that may or may not be there that he can visually recognize in front of him.
Like he can see it as if he's tripping.
And I'm like, how are you getting there?
It's just years and years and years of mindfulness in this very specific practice.
Concentration, you know, is always tied to, in every contemplative tradition, these sort of psychedelic or psychic experiences.
It's like the ability to focus and to be able to absorb consciousness in one thing seems to be the gateway into which, you know, all of those other weird experiences can arise.
But you're told to not pay attention to those experiences, that that's like, you're missing the point if you're trying to seek out these hallucinations.
There's all these people out there casting weird stuff at each other.
I've been to Tibet, so I don't know how much of it is you can just see weird stuff happening and how much of it is their mythology.
But all the same, there's enough weird stories coming out of places of people that have been sitting in caves for millennia, exploring their own consciousness.
We did a meditation a couple weekends ago and one of the guided meditations was to imagine a lotus flower in your heart that had a thousand petals and each petal was shooting off a beam of clear light that connected with another petal in another being's heart and that sort of spread out infinitely but it also went in Both directions, like in terms of the atomic and quantum level and the universes within atoms.
And it went outward in all directions.
And I'm like, okay, these dudes were, you know, because they mostly were dudes that were able to do this.
These dudes were like exploring the furthest reaches of the inner, you know, cosmos.
Well, I mean, the cultures of Tibet and most of these places, you know, there were nuns and there were women doing the practices, but I don't think they had as much opportunity to do them because of the organization of their cultures.
This is such a confusing thing to me because I've been such an advocate on the sensory deprivation tank and I talk to so many people that are into meditation.
I'm like, how do you not use the one tool that is essentially designed for the best meditation possible?
Well, retreats, you know, we've both done a lot of months of intensive retreat, and it's kind of like sensory deprivation.
I mean, you don't talk, you don't, you know, you eat what's in front of you, you're sitting in silence most of the time.
Like, it really does limit the sensory input.
Right.
And, you know, I've been in states of consciousness where all sensory input sort of disappears for a while, so I feel like I've had that experience of...
I read a study one time that says a lot of people once they have some sort of opening, we could call it mystical experience for lack of a better word right now, that a lot of people don't want to have them again after they've had it the first time.
Something about the opening kind of freaks people out.
So it seems like the expansion of consciousness is something that is naturally in us as well.
And so thinking about the technology where we started this conversation a little bit, it's like there is this impulse to explore and to expand and upload into different states and realms of being.
That's just your body trying to reclaim some sort of walls.
Let's put boundaries on this sucker so we can clearly define it.
When you have a psychedelic experience, one of the things that's the most talked about aspect of it is the boundary dissolving aspect of it.
The boundaries all dissolve.
I remember one of the first times that I did a really potent psychedelic was, 5 MEO DMT and the overwhelming message from it was that there's no up and there's no down and that you're just a part of the the infinite and that feeling is very like saying it like this is it sounds like just a bunch of noise coming out of your mouth that sort of vaguely represents what this concept would be but Experiencing it in a psychedelic state was so
overwhelmingly educational and so It was so boundary-defining, like whatever I had thought of as a boundary in the past was now like, oh, that was just this and this is just that.
And what you really are is one thing that is holding all these other things that are all a part of this huge thing.
And this huge thing is you're in it.
You're not separate.
I'm not separate from you.
You and I are these containers that are inside of this.
Yeah, no, Shinzen Young, one of our favorite teachers, he says, emptiness is not a thing, it's a pure doing, which is sort of another way of saying, I think, what you're pointing to, that everything is just happening as it is, and there's no, in a sense, there's no thing.
And that these ideas, whether it's meditation or yoga or psychedelics or these ideas of mindfulness, are in a lot of ways an attempt to escape this monkey realm, to escape this biological realm that we find ourselves in, to try to, if not escape it, rather to manage it.
I mean, I think it's personal in one way, but it's also collective in another way because we, you know, we influence each other and we get attracted to things that are connected with what's important to us.
But, you know, to me, to what, you know, I think what's beautiful is, you know, to move toward deeper sense of wisdom, to move toward being able to live in harmony with that realization of interconnectivity, of deep, of the kind of profound interconnectivity that you're describing, you know, that Literally, at some level, there isn't a separation between us.
How does that then inform how I live?
How does that change how I live?
Do I sort of say, oh, what's the fucking point and just give up?
Or do I take that experience and begin to dismantle habits and ideas and beliefs that are opposed to that experience and actually begin to live more in harmony to You know, in the kind of language of contemplative training, to embody that realization, to make it your own, you know, and to make your life an expression of that, you know, expression of that interconnectivity and compassion.
Deep care and love for each other.
Including cutting through all the bullshit.
Including calling out the delusion.
Including pimp smacking the bullshit.
Which is, I think, a big part of what I see you doing here.
Yeah, it's certainly beautiful from a biological standpoint.
I mean, I'm not a cynic in that I don't love life and I don't love humans because I enjoy this experience incredibly.
I think it's an amazing time.
I think being a person is great.
I love it.
I love people.
I love all the fun things you could do as a person.
But what I'm trying to get to when we're talking transhumanism and this escaping the boundaries of biology is There's a guy that we talked about on this podcast before that got bitten by a shark.
It's an Australian cat.
He lost his arm and his leg.
And they replaced it with this carbon fiber creation.
He's moving around.
He's standing there, no limp.
Guy walks around, normal.
Has his hand that, you know, it's kind of crude.
But it does move and it can pick things up.
And I'm like, wow, this is quite fascinating.
Like they said to this guy...
Hey, I know you got your arm and leg bit off by Shark, but lucky for you, this is 2014 and we have some incredible innovation that we've created that's gonna allow you to have this leg that moves very much like a regular leg and you're gonna have a hand that can do a lot of things that a regular hand can do.
So that's better than not having that arm and leg.
And yes, and guess what?
It's gonna get better.
Five years from now we'll have a better arm and a better leg and you're gonna enjoy this.
Well, as time goes on, the other parts of his body start failing.
Like, you know what, man, there's a problem because you have this artificial right leg, your left knee is gone, so we're going to replace your left leg too with this artificial leg.
So this way you'll have two artificial legs, but they're going to work great.
Okay, great.
Okay, listen, man, your heart is going.
But, good news, we have an artificial heart, and we're going to take this artificial...
And a hundred years from now, this guy is just a brain in this carbon...
Fiber body and he's looking at his eyes.
He's looking through these artificially created eyes and they say, listen, everything works great except the cells of your brain are reproducing irregularly and you're going to develop Parkinson's.
But we have figured out a way to download your consciousness into an artificial brain.
So we'll just download your consciousness into this art and what's left of you?
You don't.
There's nothing.
There's no biology anymore.
And, well, what's there then?
When you sit there, like, they turn that switch on and you're, you know, 2.0.
How much of that pattern is based on biological need?
How much of that pattern is based on this cultural conditioning and just the patterns of behavior that you've adopted along the way in your life and the environment in which you grew up in?
How much of that goes away when you have a brain that's made out of fibers that are constructed out of silicon or whatever?
This reminds me of, I don't know if you've had the experience, and some of my teachers talk about this as an example a lot, is looking in the mirror now, and you kind of get surprised that you've aged, but there's something in you that you don't feel has aged.
Just like, you know, you just, there's part of you that hasn't aged, and then at the same time, if you look in the mirror, you can tell that you've aged.
Does that make sense?
There's a piece of us that's like, I don't know, I still feel like nothing's changed.
But then I look in the mirror and I'm like, oh my gosh, yeah, my time is ticking even though I'm young, but I get that.
So there's this...
It's a paradox kind of at play.
So when we're talking about, like, if we do upload or what is it that is still there, like, I wonder if some of that will still be there, that feeling of nothing's changed.
And then there is this change that happens and we age.
And what I find bizarre is, like, I find it bizarre now, is, I mean, a lot of the fear of death seems to be connected to a fear of the unknown, of what would happen after death.
Like, am I just going to disappear?
You know, what's going to happen?
And not knowing that is part of, I think, of the terror, the feeling of not knowing what's going to happen.
And what I find interesting is, you know, and we were just talking to one of our Zen teachers who teaches here in Santa Monica, she pointed out, you know, in every moment we actually don't know what's coming next.
You know, that not knowing, it's something we're constantly having to deal with, the terror of not knowing.
Or, you know, as her Zen teacher called it, the don't know mind.
You know, and so...
I find it interesting to kind of reflect on what it's like to rest in the not knowing, to rest in that sense of not knowing what's going to come next.
Because in that moment, every next moment is both a death of this moment and the rebirth of something new.
There's something new coming online and there's something...
Disappearing.
And in that sense, I think if we become comfortable and familiar with that process of moment by moment birth and death, then, you know, whatever happens, whether my consciousness gets uploaded to the cloud or I die, there's some sense, there's some part of me which is fundamentally okay with that death process, that constant dying.
And that was the thing I always thought was funky about the attempt to escape death.
Because actually, in order to escape death, we're going to have to go through so many deaths of who we think we are.
Like you're saying, to transplant your consciousness into a silicon brain, some part of you dies in that.
And so we're trying to escape death by running into it headlong.
There's so many different aspects to what is life, what defines this existence for the person who experiences it themselves, and does that transition to something else at the moment of death?
And is that why the brain produces all these endogenous psychedelic chemicals that give you, when you take them, give you this elated sense of being, give you this This sense of relieving of anxiety and this sense of connection to everything and everyone that exists.
Why do those exist?
Why are those chemicals in the mind and why are they released at the moment of death?
Why are they released at the moment of extreme stress when your body's worried it's going to die?
Why are those released during the dream state?
What is that?
And would we be trapping whatever consciousness we have now In this artificial creation, if you can download consciousness into some artificial creation, is that a hellish existence for that consciousness?
Because it's no longer able to transition to the next phase of being?
And would you be able to transition to that next phase of being as a biological entity?
And then realize, like, oh my god, what did I do with my consciousness?
I've heard the argument, and I think this is interesting too, though, that the need for community goes back to the very earliest moments of the universe.
That, in some sense, when atoms emerged, they emerged in collectives.
They didn't just emerge as a single atom.
When a single thing emerges, it emerges also with a collective.
In that sense, the sense of community is hardwired maybe into the universe itself.
I mean, the whole idea is these things grow and these other things come along and eat them as they grow.
And there's no way around it.
Life eats life.
And you can try to keep your...
Biological footprint as small as possible and do as little harm as possible, but every step you take is killing life.
Every time you close your mouth, you're killing bacteria.
I mean, when you wash yourself, you're killing living things.
There's a lot of weirdness to this whole life that is tied to survival, tied to birth, death, and the prolonging of the species, or the improvement of the species as it tries to prolong.
Well, that's fascinating you bringing that up because that does open up a different realm of possibilities.
We can transcend the limitations of biology and that includes experiencing multiple things simultaneously or the ability to experience multiple lives like if we figure out a way to combine our consciousness or whatever we call our consciousness once we transcend biological life and combine our minds so that we do experience the lives of multiple people if not the entire human race that's on the same track Experience it all simultaneously and
that this is beyond the realm of biological understanding.
Maybe that's where we evolve from this thing and become something that's far more complex and complicated.
What if there's a Mac version and a Windows version, and they're non-compatible, and everyone's trying to figure out which one is going to be the Betamax, and which one...
Betamax was better, but VHS survived, and you've got to pick the right team.
This is reminding me of the fluidity of perspectives as I've trained and practiced.
It's like the mind has the capacity to take on multiple perspectives and how important that actually is in the world today to be able to take different points of view and take multiple perspectives.
What you said also that's fascinating is this idea that we can't even really...
Imagine what the potentials are because the potentials will create new potentials that were before that unrecognizable.
We didn't see them coming.
Like, if you went back in time a few hundred years ago and tried to explain to them the internet, they'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
If you went back before the printing press and tried to explain the internet and trying to access Google on your phone with voice commands or Siri, you know?
Yeah, try to explain that to people that lived before printed type.
They'd be like, what are you even yapping about?
They would never be able to wrap their head around it, much like we will never be able to wrap our head around the possibilities once we transcend the biological limitations.
The hive mind, to me, seems to be the most likely.
Well, that's what McKenna's belief was about DMT, is that he believed that if you could create a world that mimics exactly the psychedelic experience of dimethyltryptamine, that he believed that in that state, those same beings that you interface with when you take the psychedelic drugs would show up.
He had this, like, field of dreams type scenario.
If you build it, they'll come.
And that that would be the best case scenario for psychedelic intervention.
It wasn't getting a bunch of people to take drugs.
It's not even essentially that we're going to have a different biological body, but we might have a different reality that is indistinguishable from this reality that we can pick up and put on a scale.
The concept of virtual existence, of some sort of existence in a simulation, as it were.
Simulation is a weird word.
Because simulation implies that it's not real.
But if it has all the consequences and all the feeling and textures and all the interactions and interfaces that the regular life does as far as tactile, as far as heat, sensitivity, all the different aspects of our life, we could recreate those exactly.
What is that if it's not life?
If it is an experience and you're taking in every single aspect of that experience exactly the same way you would take in this life, what is it?
And if that's the case, how do we know we're not already in it?
How do we know that this isn't an indistinguishable artificial reality that we have created and we're just tapped into this sucker?
I would agree in the sense that it's quite possible that if it is possible to one day achieve the sort of Technological ability to create something that's indistinguishable from this reality.
If it is possible, and I assume that it's going to be possible, if you hear about things like this new Oculus Rift and compare it to the quill that used to have to dip into ink to write things down, that was the only way to distribute information.
Yeah, it's possible that one day we're going to achieve that.
But the other thing that you have to take into consideration is it's almost universally accepted that at least if this world is real, and if this life that we are living is not a simulation, it's universally accepted that this is the pinnacle of human innovation.
That we are at the cusp.
We're at the apex right now.
And that we are at the very...
Like, there's more information today, we have more knowledge, we have more of an understanding of our universe than any human beings before us ever have, ever.
So if that's the case, why wouldn't we assume that we just haven't reached it yet?
That seems to be far more likely than the possibility that no civilization ever achieves it.
I don't understand why anybody would reach a contrary conclusion if all the evidence, whether it's cultural, like watching old television shows and comparing them to the sophistication of today's, whether it's musical, comparing old Beethoven music and old music from the 50s, like Buddy Holly type shit, and comparing it to what people are doing today, whether it's Technological, which is super easy and clear to grasp and understand.
There's no doubt whatsoever that we're at the apex.
As far as what we can observe, we have more ability, we're more competent, we're more able to alter our environment, communicate, etc.
Our technology is far more...
Far more complex than ever has been at any other time in human history that's been recorded that we can access.
So if that's the case, why wouldn't we just assume that we're on this path to that?
Why would we assume that no civilization has ever achieved it or can ever achieve it?
We've got this story about, you know, the universe started this many billion years ago with the Big Bang, and then it sort of coalesced into whatever it coalesced into, and eventually, you know, life emerged a billion years ago and evolved to be what it is now.
And we're at this sort of linear progression of evolution unfolding.
But that story is only like 200 years old.
So why would we assume that that story is accurate?
Or that that way of looking at it is accurate?
I mean, it seems more likely that in 100 years we'll have a completely different conception of what the universe is.
And I wonder if part of that conception, part of what we'll break down...
And I'll tie this back into the contemplative tradition because it's something that breaks down in contemplative practice, is the sense that time exists in the way we think it exists.
It exists in a linear kind of motion.
Time, you know, in the Zen tradition with Dogen, is holochronic.
Like the holographic universe, you know, all these things are contained within themselves.
In this sort of, a lot of these Buddhist descriptions of consciousness, you know, all times exist simultaneously and can be accessed simultaneously.
You know, it can be accessed here or there.
And so in that sense, you know, the...
As the traditional texts say, the Buddhas of past, present, and future all exist right now, including ourselves.
And I don't know, that would be a very different way of experiencing time.
I experience it, you know, maybe on occasions experience it that way, but for the most part, that is not the way I tend to think this is a linear thing that's got to start and it'll have an end.
Well, the number one mindfuck of all time is infinity.
And being that not only is infinity...
I think, especially when your children...
Kids will say something like, I win times infinity.
What infinity...
The big mindfuck of infinity is that not only is...
The concept of infinity impossible to grasp, but the parameters of that concept are so strange that if infinity is real and if the universe is infinite, the way it's been described to me is that everything that has ever happened on this earth in the exact order has happened On other Earths an infinite number of times, including every single timeline.
So right now the 1950s are going on an infinite number of times in the exact same order the 1950s went on in America.
The 1950s on Earth, the 1950s are going on an infinite number of times in the universe, as are the 1960s, as are 1961, December 21st, as are December 22nd.
All those days are happening We're good to go.
Those things are all happening simultaneously throughout the universe.
So everything is happening all at once.
So if infinity is correct, like what their concept of time being constant and happening all at once, it is.
It is happening all at once.
It's just the container that holds it in is infinite.
And, okay, a question to riff off that that I'd ask is, and is consciousness something that's happening to this biological being in this one variation of the universe?
Or is consciousness something that moves through this infinite potentiality and experiences it?
If you wake up and you're in this other you somewhere else in the multiverse.
Your decisions and choices allow you to travel from one potential to the next, but wherever you left off, maybe you were a smoker or a drinker in the past, or you had some sort of bad habits, and you escaped those bad habits, but not every timeline.
Not in this timeline.
Maybe not yet.
Maybe you will after this conversation.
You know what I mean?
The idea being that we believe that we're limited to this very same physical space in the universe because this is where we are every day.
But what if we transfer our consciousness from this one to the next one?
And they're indistinguishable from each other physically to us, but not.
Their potential is very different and that, in a sense, you are dimension traveling.
I hate it when I accuse myself, rightly so, of hippie bullshit.
But if infinity is correct, and not only do they believe that the universe is infinite, but they believe there are an infinite number of universes, which is the ultimate, ultimate mindfuck, the fractal nature of reality itself being that...
Every single galaxy, which contains hundreds of billions of stars, has a supermassive black hole in the center of it, which is exactly one half of one percent of the mass of the entire galaxy.
And if you pass through that, you will enter into another universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with a black hole in the center that has a portal to another universe.
And then the whole thing just keeps going on.
So they're all, the whole, every universe is infinite and inside every universe is an infinite number of universes.
And that's how big it is.
That's why every timeline that has ever existed, every possibility is all happening simultaneously all throughout the whole thing.
But the concept of infinity is undeniable mathematically.
That's the problem.
It's that you can't just ignore...
All you have to do is go outside and look up.
You go outside and look up at night and you see stars and realize those are just an impossible distance.
And those are the neighbors.
Those are the ones that are really close.
And if you stood on one of those stars and looked out into the distance, you would see stars that were equally far away, that seemed equally ridiculous to try to reach.
And if you got to those, there's no end.
You're going to keep going and going and going.
So all the evidence of infinity, at least of the concept of great distance being outside of the realm of understanding, it's right in front of us every night.
There's people that are conscious that are just, they're apes.
They're just wandering through this life, drinking and walking in the walls.
Like, aren't they conscious as well?
And isn't that consciousness like a very limited consciousness?
And as consciousness expands, what's the ongoing theme?
When we're talking about meditation and meditative practices, enlightenment, achieving these psychedelic states through consciousness adjustment or consciousness manipulation, there's levels and layers to the whole thing.
Yeah, there are levels and layers and there is this unified field of consciousness which no matter what is arising in it and how simple or complex it is, it's just what it is.
That's why it's really strange to me that the concept of simple biology As opposed to complex biological life that understands itself.
The simple biology of individual cells or then multi-celled organisms and then the concept of a being that's aware of itself and can communicate over vast distances like human beings.
Extrapolate that a thousand years plus whatever it is from now.
Do we have the ability to do the same thing with consciousness throughout the entire universe itself?
Like, is our ability to communicate over vast distances and to communicate with each other, is this just a beginning stage and this never-ending process?
Of dissolving boundaries, where the actual boundaries of space itself no longer exist.
And we can interface with intelligent life that has figured out the same sort of shit everywhere else in the world.
And whether or not those are just fables the same way the ancient Hawaiians, the Polynesians talked about the gods stitching the stars together with thread.
You know, maybe that's what our concept of the Big Bang is just our antiquated notion or our rather primitive notion of something that's really beyond our capacity to understand.
Strange computer code discovered concealed in super string equations.
This is a little bit of nonsense in the beginning.
For the first 30 seconds, it's like weird.
Here, play it.
unidentified
Images that are behind your head right now.
These are pictures of equations.
I've been, for the last 15 years, trying to answer the kinds of questions that my colleagues have been raising.
And what I've come to understand is that there are these incredible pictures That contain all the information of a set of equations that are related to string theory.
And it's even more bizarre than that because when you then try to understand these pictures you find out that buried in them are computer codes just like the type that you find in a browser when you go surf the web.
And so I'm left with the puzzle of trying to figure out whether I live in the matrix or not.
Are you saying your attempt to understand the fundamental operations of nature leads you to a set of equations that are indistinguishable from the equations that drive search engines and browsers on our computers?
there's some entity that programmed the universe and we're just expressions of their code?
unidentified
Well, I didn't say that.
Like the matrix?
That's what you said.
Some of those codes are showing on the screen behind you right now.
They don't look like codes, but these pictures, which we call adinkras, are graphical representations of sets of equations that are based on codes so this is in fact to answer your question more directly I have in my life come to a very strange place because I never expected that the movie The Matrix might be an accurate representation of the place in which I live Jim, may I give you an argument that we don't live in the matrix?
A very simple argument.
Give me one now, quick!
A very simple argument.
There's a property that the real world right down here has, that no mathematical equation has, that no solution of an equation has, that no abstract object has.
Here in the real world it is always some moment, which is one of a series of passing moments.
In a mathematical equation, it doesn't have a flow of time in it.
It just is.
And this means...
Wait, wait, let him finish.
I need him here and now.
This means, to me, that the ancient metaphysical fantasy that we quote, are just mathematics, cannot be true.
Because in a world that was just mathematics, There would be no moment of time.
Why isn't there math as a function of time?
I'm sorry.
These are differential equations.
But then you lay the solution out.
Lee, you're mistaking...
You keep using the word is, and I'm talking about the word describe.
But describe is fine.
No, no, but let me finish, please, since we started with my discussion.
The point is that I... You know, it's fun to talk about some deep metaphysical...
essence that sits behind physics but for some of us it's about trying to find the most accurate way to describe where we live and so my statement is that in the description of our universe that is a supersymmetrical universe which we were going to test in the LHC if you believe that description I can show you the presence of these codes that's my statement I'm fucked.
You listen to what these guys have just described and talked about.
I disagree with the one guy saying that because we live in this moment and there's like this linear pattern to things that it can't be a mathematical equation.
That's not true.
That doesn't make any sense.
That's like saying if there is a car and the car is driving on a road that has been created by people, if it's going from one distance, if it's traveling, that it can't possibly be an artificially created environment.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
It's like you're traveling through this thing.
Just because you're experiencing the now and it's progressive and you know the past and you're looking forward to the future and you're moving and you're in this moment, that doesn't mean it's not a mathematic representation.
Well, what comes to mind is that a lot of times in our formulas or our mathematic equations, and I'm not a mathematician, the mind tendency is to lock down on the variables, but then it locks it down.
I just don't understand the argument that if I guess he's trying to say, in a sense, that because we experience individual moments, we have this moment, we're in this moment, and that it's progressive, that this wouldn't be the case if it was a mathematical equation.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
Maybe I'm just too dumb, but it seems to me that that leaves out the possibilities of yes, you could do that.
Yes, it could be a mathematical equation that you're experiencing, or it could be that this idea of this computer code that they're finding is just simply a lot like so many other codes that we found in things that indicate that nature has some sort of a pattern to it, like the Fibonacci sequence.
Like, you know, the idea that these codes that exist in nature, they don't exist because this is artificial, but they exist because nature essentially runs on mathematics.
I make this argument so often to try to undercut the notion that using technology to develop your ability to contemplate the universe and consciousness, that that somehow is unnatural.
I use that all the time.
But I'm thinking you could say the same thing, like everything is artificial.
Everything is generated from something else.
The Big Bang came from somewhere else.
where the mathematical formulas and the starting conditions came from some non-physical place outside of this universe.
And so therefore they're artificial from this perspective.
But I think that's the same, saying the same thing is everything is natural.
Yeah.
Like everything is artificial and everything is natural.
Yeah, and yet there seem to be patterns, you know, like people have certain values and share those values with others, and there's a collective code that seems to be running as well.
There's something weird to our desire that this Marshall McLuhan's idea that we're the sex objects of the machine world, that what we're doing is we're giving birth like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
We're unaware of our actions really ultimately being a part of this transition from the monkey body into this new transcendent thing.
But then the big...
Question is what is that and what's the purpose of that and if we do become that does it just sit?
Does it say what's the point moving?
You know, I'm just gonna sit here What's the point in innovating?
There's no need.
What's the point in creating new ones to what do more of nothing?
So we show up on some planet someday and And there's these super complex artificial beings that were created by biological beings, and then they just stopped, and they all just sat around waiting for the next stage of existence, and it never came.
Well, if you stop and think about the birth and death of stars and planets, if these artificial beings live on planets, They have a lifetime, a lifespan, whether they like it or not.
Whether it's 500 billion years or whatever the hell your star's got in its tank, when that sucker's out, it's going to supernova, and that's a wrap, son.
There's no more artificial intelligence on that rock that's spinning around in space.
And the question is, does the artificial intelligence that exists recognize that and feel the need to protect itself from this finite existence by building a spaceship and traveling, physically traveling from dimension to dimension?
Yeah, so at a sense, like, you know, I've had experiences, too, where the concentration becomes so strong that things just start to break down and everything seems to be dissolving and reconstructing and dissolving and reconstructing.
Right, but isn't this just the perceptions of your own mind?
Isn't this just that your mind has this ability to perceive its surroundings and its environment?
And in meditation, you're altering the parameters.
You're changing the influences.
You're changing the physical state, the flow of the neurotransmitters, and all these different things are changing how you view the environment itself.
But you're not really changing the environment at all.
Yeah, like, the paradox of, you know, can we describe this from the outside objectively, and, like, that's the most true perspective, or do we describe it as the subjective conscious experience of it?
Which is more true?
And I keep going back to like you can't reduce one to the other or conflate one to the other entirely.
Otherwise, you basically are just sort of propping up a particular perspective as the ultimate truth.
I don't know.
I think there's something completely disenchanted about seeing everything as physical objects and this as a kind of hallucination to make us feel better so we can continue to propagate.
I think there's something fundamentally wrong about that on the level of being a conscious being.
And yet, I also see the tendency for people to conflate their own experiences with the external universe as being highly problematic, too.
It's also, I think, like Emily was saying, the moment we solidify reality, then we lose the background.
We lose the sense that We don't actually completely know.
That every story we've ever told as a species has ended up being wrong at some level.
It's not actually like the Big Bang.
At some point we're going to realize that story was the best story we could come up with to describe the evolution of the physical universe or the development of it or whatever.
But at some point, we're going to discover something that just blows our minds again.
And then we're going to have to come up with a new story that can make sense of that.
And we're going to get solidified about that.
We're going to think, oh, that's actually the way it really is.
And so I think there's something about certainty and really thinking we have it worked out that becomes problematic at some level.
And the disenchantment, like, part of that comes from, like, I feel like people can get disconnected from their hearts.
And that can be airy-fairy, too.
But that is real to be up in the mind and the brain and then forget that there is the feelings and the tenderness and the vulnerability in a positive way.
Because there's actually a lot of power in the vulnerability.
So there's some sort of balance that I think comes into play from some of the Eastern traditions and then some of the Western traditions because I feel that balance too in the room as we're talking between, you know, opening more into the mystical part of things and then also, you know, needing the concepts, needing the rational mind, needing the science.
Because the modern world is essentially without balance.
That's the number one criticism of it, is that we're raping the earth and torturing our planet, robbing it of its resources and polluting the oceans and all that jazz.
There isn't a balance to it all.
And that the experience is just what it is for you.
You live this life and your perceptions and your ideas are essentially what flavor it for you.
And if you choose to be Mr. No-Nonsense, you still die.
And the concept of consciousness in this way is more empowering or at least gives you a better feeling about the life that you're living and may enhance that experience, may make that experience a more pleasurable ride.
Like, I was there with a buddy, well, Duncan and another buddy of mine, we were walking on the street and going to this restaurant, and then we went to this bar.
I was like, where else is there a place like this?
It's like this small town of really like-minded folks, very open-minded.
Your daily life and troubles, they are balanced in perspective by the images that you're seeing of the most spectacular versions of art that nature's created.
That's what the mountains are to me.
Snow covered, tree covered, whatever they are.
Seeing a lake at the bottom of a canyon and just like...
Nature's stunning works of art, and just the sheer, vast magnitude of them, like the Rockies, forces people into this sort of humility.
There's something about nature that's super important.
It's like people that live in a place where they don't get a chance to see it.
And New York City, in a sense, is humbling in its own way because, as we said, everything is natural.
Human beings creating cities are not much different than a beehive.
It's just we're way better at making shit than bees are, so we make skyscrapers.
But when you're in Manhattan, like, last time I was there, I was staying at this hotel and we were pretty high up.
And, you know, you open up your window and you look out the window like, whoa, this is crazy!
This is so futuristic and bizarre.
We're in the middle of it.
All the buildings are around us.
We're seeing all these people moving around inside of their windows.
Some of them, I'm sure, with binoculars and telescopes and shit, peering out at all the different stories that are playing out in the various little cubicles and boxes around them.
But I think that, at least to me, the most peaceful version of that kind of imagery is the natural version.
The real natural version as far as non-man created, I should say.
The mountains.
And there's something about it.
Especially a place like Asheville or a place like Boulder.
It's just defined by its environment.
Yeah.
So, the Buddhist geeks thing, one of the things that I thought that was interesting that you said, that I find too, is that you start doing it and people start getting connected to it and then you feel like you're kind of stuck in it.
Like, in that, like, boy, I have a responsibility now.
Usually it's with a person or group that we're exploring a particular topic.
We've explored a lot around the interface of technology and Buddhist practice, various intersection points of how Buddhism is sort of interfacing with psychology and science and technology and various aspects of culture.
So we'll usually kind of go into one of those intersection points and explore it with someone who's really been working at that interface and so who is, you know, in some ways the most informed in terms of their ignorance about what's going on at that interface and just kind of explore it and see what happens.
So recently, I talked to a neuroscientist named David Vago, who's at Harvard, and he's a contemplative neuroscientist.
And Jake Davis, who's a Buddhist cognitive philosopher.
And we sort of explored some of the recent work around finding and discovering a neuroscience of enlightenment.
And they've been sort of working with the question, is there a neuroscience of enlightenment?
Can we see what enlightenment, in quotes, looks like in the brain?
And is that even possible philosophically?
Like, is enlightenment one thing or is it many things?
And so we really just went through and explored some of their ideas around enlightenment.
What is it?
What conceptions are they using?
What have they found in their research?
Because David's been working a lot with folks like Shinzen Young, who has been meditating for 40 years and who has a really kind of Complex system of meditation and mindfulness practice, and it's something that he designed to be able to be scientifically studied.
So they've been sort of putting advanced meditators in various fMRI machines and sort of seeing what happens when they do various kinds of tasks, seeing what happens when they have these kind of peak moments, you know, what actually is occurring in the nervous system, seeing if they can come up with a model to describe that neuroscientifically.
And when we got in there for one of these meditation studies afterwards, I was like, are they taking into account the fact that the fMRI machine itself is like a completely altered state experience?
Yeah, I talked to a neuroscientist and they were explaining that there's some issues with fMRIs where they're trying to use them for crime investigation.
And they're being used by people who don't understand the limitations of the technology.
So someone was accused of a crime in India, accused of murder, and convicted by an fMRI result because the fMRI showed functional knowledge of the crime scene.
And she was very concerned about this because her perceptions of it were you could, by reviewing the case itself and by reviewing the information, you could give someone functional knowledge of a crime scene without them actually having been there while the crime scene was going on.
So if you could read that there's functional knowledge of a crime scene, it doesn't mean that the person has actually been there while the crime was being played out.
I mean, there's people that have functional knowledge of all sorts of places, like Mount Rushmore.
If you play that in some folks' head that have deeply studied history and been paying a lot of attention, you might be able to show some sort of a functional knowledge of the area itself.
Especially if they have a vested interest in studying this, like they're being accused of a murder, you would think there would be a lot of intensity and emotional connection to that.
But these concepts, like all these different things, when it comes to technology and the understanding of the human brain, they're evolving right now in front of us so rapidly.
I mean, just recently in the contemplative neuroscience field, they discovered that when you're, you know, not doing anything that is like your baseline state, that you are in fact doing something.
And they just sort of, that was one of the big insights that came out of a contemplative neuroscience was that the default mode network of the brain is actually the selfing network.
It's the network that is constantly constructing the sense of identity and referencing oneself, even when you're not doing anything.
So that was, you know, the assumption prior to that was just like, when you're not doing anything, nothing's happening.
But no, actually, a lot of stuff's happening.
It's like your self-program is running, basically.
I can't separate now out the experience of talking to all these people and exploring some of the topics that we explore from my experience now of How I understand the world.
It's just so intertwined.
I'm sure you can, you know, kind of relate to that.
Yeah, that's why I wanted to ask you because it becomes like a part of your life is not just about having these conversations but about broadcasting these conversations and exploring them not just through your own curiosity but through Trying to either illuminate or figure out a way to express these ideas across where you think they're going to be accepted or understood the best.
Understood is probably the best way to describe it.
The way it's going to interface with the most amount of people.
I mean, sometimes I think, you know, it's one of the most grandiose things to do is to start a podcast or to start, you know, to be a media, you know, person.
He started the podcast seven years ago, so I've kind of been on the periphery of it and just watching it from the outside perspective, too.
It's fairly interesting to see how his podcast and the stuff that he talks about and his own development, I don't know if you can relate to it, has really come across in each episode.
And now we have an archive of seven years of development of his own understanding and then how everything just kind of converges.
Well, the beautiful thing about a podcast is that you don't have someone telling you what the subject of today is going to be.
You don't have someone telling you, this is what you should be interested in.
You find these unique individual visions because of podcasts.
And some of them are ridiculously stupid and some of them are awesome.
And what's ridiculously stupid to me is awesome to someone else.
And that's kind of the beauty of podcasting.
And it goes along with what we're talking about, I think, when it comes to Technology and social media is like the the interfacing with ideas the ability to exchange information It's all sort of radically changing right in front of us and you know podcasting is just a part of that absolutely How do you feel like you're going to take this thing into the future?
No, I think for us, we're doing Buddhist Geeks as a media project, but we're also meditation teachers, and we work a lot with other folks, and we've trained with various Buddhist teachers.
So for us, we're wanting to make a space both for these conversations, but also for people to practice together in virtual space so that's a lot of our focus lately is on how to reinvent the Buddhist practice tradition for the 21st century and a big part of that that we're working on now is is doing retreats online you know periods of intensive immersive practice that happen in the context of your life and also you know we're building what we're calling the Buddhist Geeks Dojo which is
going to be kind of we're describing it as an early version of the matrix for training your mind The Buddhist Geeks Dojo.
It'll be at least a place for people to meditate together, to talk about what's happening in their practice, which basically is their life, and to find a community of folks who are kind of on a similar journey of cultivating certain kinds of states of mind and certain understandings.
You could call mindfulness a form of secular Buddhism.
I mean, certainly the guy that's had the most impact on the mindfulness movement, Jon Kabat-Zinn, spent a number of decades studying Buddhism in India and Asia.
So, I mean, those things are very big shifts in terms of how it's being practiced and the context that it's being held in and Well, that's funny that you said the secular, because most people would consider Buddhism to be some sort of a, or maybe one of the only secular religions.
I mean, there are lots of forms that are very rigid in terms of how they're taught and what to believe when you do them.
I mean, I think that's hard to escape in a certain way because when people find something that is really powerful and works, they get really fixated on it.
Being integrated in your life, you know how it is.
And I think that's true of most religions that are doing well.
It's like they've moved away from the transcendent and toward the imminent.
They're reconceiving divinity as something that exists in your life as it is.
It's not something that's beyond your life in some way that something's wrong with your life or your body, that this is a sinful, terrible vessel that is completely limited.
I mean, and it is in one sense, but in another sense, that's an intermediary insight from my experience.
I think that there's a tendency to project—I mean, you brought in the word divinity, so I'll use that—to project our divinity onto the teachers or onto some sort of system.
And it can be disempowering for a lot of people.
People can get trapped in beliefs that have been carried forward for years and centuries that isn't forwarding anymore.
And so that sense, like, by choosing to go under Buddhism, we're also choosing to, you know, work on how we can evolve how we think about it.
And one thing that I really like is the practices themselves, the mind training aspect of it.
That's what's been really beneficial to me.
And that's one of the reasons why I've chosen to continue because of its impact.
Personally, I can say personally, I feel much, much more open, much more generous, compassionate.
There's a lot more freedom.
I can get stuck on the smaller sense of self-meaning.
I have these thoughts of unworthiness or self-contraction or Hatred or any of those, you know, biological kind of urges.
And at the same time, they're so transient and they're so not who I am.
And I see that very, very clearly that it kind of diminishes in just a second on the good days.
Sometimes it's more intense and I've learned to really work with that and learn how to see clearly what's happening so that I have the freedom to Really choose how to live my life in a much more full way.
If someone came along with another name, though, like Buddhist, like the word Buddhist, if someone came along with another name for a similar practice, do you think that it would be accepted?
Yeah, no, there's something, I don't know, my own experience, and it's a little embarrassing in a secular context to talk about this, because...
It's weird to say, you know, for whatever reason, I just fell in love with the forms and the ritual and just the feel of it, the aesthetic of Buddhism.
For some reason, I just immediately felt a sense of being at home when I went to the first meditation retreat.
I was there practicing and I was like, oh wow.
And I felt this deep sense of connection with that particular form.
And for whatever reason, it just works for me.
It's unlocked a lot very rapidly that I don't know that would have been otherwise possible if I was trying to do some sort of practice that I didn't really connect with that much.
Something about just the love of the form and the aesthetic itself that I can't really explain except that I've always liked Asian stuff.
And the inclining of the mind towards awakenings or awakening, you know, that framework in itself, it's an interesting inclination.
So, you know, just like we had the Holy Grail, we mentioned that earlier, the inclination towards some kind of inquiry into, okay, and the question presented itself earlier, like, who are we?
Who is this?
And I've found that the techniques and the forms have been really revealing in that way.
And I think the best teachers, you know, we're learning as we become hopefully a little better as teachers is that the best teachers use that situation to help people kind of gain a confidence in their own experience and to be able to No freedom for themselves, you know, through their own practices of paying attention and being with things.
And in that sense, the best teachers are the ones that make themselves irrelevant.
It's a quality of kind of a little bit of sludginess of the mind and of an increase in self-referencing talk for me, of more subtle fear and anxiety and self-preoccupation.
In the sense that I described, like, you know, after I've smoked marijuana, like, during it's, you know, it's an insightful opening experience, but after there's a sense of kind of being groggy and sludgy and, like, everything is, like, less clear and less open than before.
And so there's a quality of kind of, like, contraction that comes after the expansion.
I mean, so personally, I don't have anything against mind-altering substances.
I think meditation is a mind-altering substance.
I'm more just curious about, like, how do we use those substances?
Are we trying to get away from our experience?
Are we trying to have insights?
Because the problem with so many substances is you get into a pattern of really trying to cope with the difficulty of experience and then getting addicted to that state as a way of dealing with And I think that's where the problem comes in from a kind of mind training and contemplative perspective.
I mean, I'm exaggerating a little, but not that much.
I mean, there are people who have had profound, profound realizations of the interconnection of all things, and they are profoundly dysfunctional on other levels.
And I've met many of those folks and have been those folks at times.
I'd say it's been less the Buddhist meditation as much as it's been healing just parts of my past, being a human and having been through difficult times.
I think more of it's probably been psychological...
And one of the common things that happens in a spiritual context is that people use their spiritual practice to bypass those human psychological issues.
It's called spiritual bypassing.
So for me, I think part of what happened is I bypassed for a long time and went really deep in a particular way and then had to come back around and deal with my human experience on a level that I hadn't wanted to before.
So it's almost like you have these sort of confining aspects of your personality that because of your perceptions those confining aspects are probably good and then Buddhism comes along and blows down those boundaries and you're like, I'm not ready for this yet!
And then you freak out for a little bit and then you come back around.
Yeah, and then the integration part, I think, is kind of what you're talking about, too, is going deep in the contemplative space, and then if we're inclining our minds towards, you know, seeing the reality of, like, what's really happening here, like, how are we constructing this reality?
And that starts to, you know, peel back, you know, there are moments where it's like so much, there's a lot of freedom, and then at the same time, it's like, oh, crap, like, I gotta figure out how to integrate this in my life.
And maybe that, those insights of the vastness and the spaciousness and that, you know, we're not just our bodies and we're not just our limited views of who we are.
You know, those insights have to be integrated into the way that we live our life.
And that's the challenging part.
That's when, you know, the rubber meets the road.
And that, you know, takes psychological work.
It takes body work.
It takes really...
It's humbling.
It's very humbling.
Because then putting the teacher on the pedestal, going back to that, it's like, oh, okay, we're actually all in this together.
And, you know, maybe, you know, I've traveled these inter-worlds and can help other people navigate them.
And at the same time, you know, we have to come back as a collective.
And, like, you know, we've got to wash the dishes.
He's got to take out the trash.
And then, you know, if you have kids, you've got to raise the kids.
And And how do you do that without killing each other?
One of our teachers, Jack Kornfield, says often you have to remember your Buddha nature and your zip code both.
And the zip code part, I think, can be hard if you've been focusing mostly on recognizing your so-called Buddha nature is the way that your mind inherently is.
And then when it is integrated, I definitely want to flesh this out just a little bit more so people can get the sense of that, yes, there are difficulties.
And there are beautiful, vast, spacious moments.
And then at the same time, and even if you don't have any beautiful, vast, spacious moments, even this moment in itself as you're sitting here can be beautiful.
We've all touched into that, you know?
So it's like, there's a sense that when, it's a wearing out, that's how I would describe it.
It's a wearing out process of a smaller sense of who we are.
And That integration process is not always easy, and yet, as it happens overall and over the long run, we are very, very, very beautiful people.
There's that capacity to be extremely powerful, extremely beautiful, and connected, really connected with each other.
And that's what inspires me to talk about all of this.
I mean, we're not evangelists in the sort of missionary sense.
I think we're evangelists in the sense that we think there's value here for some people, for some of the time, that are inclined toward this or find it attractive.
And if they do, like we have, it's useful to be able to connect with other folks who've done it and who...
In some sense can be there with you.
One of our mentors said the role of a teacher is to be just a little less afraid than the student.
It doesn't mean they have it completely figured out.
It just means they have a little bit less fear of what's happening.
So I think it's useful to connect with people like that if you find you're attracted to something like that.
If you're into psychedelics, we've explored psychedelics.
It's useful to go work with people who know a bit about it and who can Not freak out if you have a bad trip or if you start losing your mind.
That can extend their stability to you so that you can actually go through that process and learn from it.
And in the end, have an empowering experience of it.
Or at least an empowering interpretation of what happened.
Instead of just feeling like, oh my god, my reality sucks and I'm just going to be depressed and kind of crawl into a hole.
So I think in the same way, for us, we just want to create a space where people can practice together like they've been doing for thousands of years, sitting and exploring their minds in a collective.