The Joe Rogan Experience - #530 - Vince & Emily Horn, from Buddhist Geeks

Episode Date: August 4, 2014

Buddhist Geeks is a podcast, on-line magazine and annual conference with a primary focus on American Buddhism. You can listen to it on Spotify.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! I've got to figure out a better way to do commercials because it's always weird when two people out of three are just sitting there and one person is talking, doing a bunch of... It creates an uncomfortable air in the room, am I right? A little bit.

A little bit, right? It's a little odd. Buddhist Geeks Somebody Uh, somebody, uh, sent me a link. I guess it was probably a couple of weeks ago on Twitter to you guys. And right away I went, Oh, this could be interesting. A convergence of, would you say spirituality, Buddhism and technology? That's what you call it. And and geeks which always is somehow connected with um impairment and vision which is very strange right like being very studious and intelligent is connected to your eyes are fucked like every you know i mean you're staring at screens all day i think is that what it must be right because as i've spent more time in front of the computer

my eyes have steadily gotten worse. But your image, the logo is the Buddha with glasses on. So even the divine are not immune to the perils of LCD screens. True enough. That's right. Is there a better way around this? To do something where it doesn't completely destroy

your vision? Maybe clairvoyance. You can develop that capacity. That's the only way? Reading does it too, right? Because we've always associated reading with or is it just getting old and we're just blaming it on a bunch of other shit could be that but i i think it's staring at things up close you know there's just i think the eyes just get used to staring at things up close and then they just can't see far away anymore that's my theory with me it's the opposite though my up close vision is starting to suck but my my vision like looking at you guys this distance is fine it's perfect that might be age then yeah i think it's age because

also because when i put on reading glasses um 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 the like if you know you look at pages, you can see the actual detail, the texture and the paper itself. That's all gone to me. That's all gone in the real world. What is Buddhist Geeks? What are you guys doing? 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 are 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 of 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 eight-year odyssey.

And Emily recently, about four years ago, kind of joined the team, and we have been doing the mom and pop thing since. I love it. I love that Buddhism has rebels. Yes, absolutely. What is the main thing that people fight, not fight against, but rebel against with Buddhism? 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 and 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, I guess, generational pushback and saying, actually, we don't want to meditate like the hippies did. We don't want lotus flowers and incense. We want our computer screens and meditation apps. We want to do it the way it makes sense to us.

Is that an effective way to do it, like meditation apps? Is that real? Is that legit? Are there some recommended meditation apps that are better than traditional forms of meditation or an alternative, I should say, to traditional forms of meditation? I think there are. There's some good ones. I think they're good to start.

I mean, as soon as you start really getting into it, though, then it's useful to, I think, still meet space has the upper hand over the app space. Interesting. Yeah. But I'd recommend Buddhify. That was one that Emily and I contributed to, and it's a modern mindfulness on the go app. So it sort of teaches you how to meditate in different contexts, like if you're

at the gym or if you're, you know, on the tube. You wrote one for working on the computer. Yep. I've wrote a couple for working on the computer. So it's really just about trying to bridge like what we're doing already in our lives with meditation practice and these ancient traditions that have come down. What do you, What is the app for working on the computer? What does that entail? Buddhify 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, we all usually have some sort of touchscreen mobile device, and so 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. When you say more aware, you mean, because a lot of people are kind of scattered? They're all over the place and thinking about the past. Yeah, because we're on Facebook one minute, and then we're on all kinds of different apps. You name one.

Is Facebook the devil? No. Sometimes. Yeah. There's no meditation in Facebook, though, correct? Not yet. Not correct? Not yet. Not yet. What I think Facebook's...

We have to bring it into it. It's a fascination with social interaction, right? That's what it is. It's this thing where... 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. Absolutely. And so that's why people gravitate towards what seems to be really inane, like this pull towards, oh my God, she left him and he went up with her. And oh goodness, you see those magazine covers, you just want to grab them.

And people who have no part of your life at all, you shouldn't be caring about them even remotely, but for whatever reason, you're compelled to do it. Just a little bit of that with the Facebook thing, right? I totally agree. 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. Yeah. McLuhan has one of my favorite all-time quotes, is that human beings are the sex organs for the machine world. Ooh.

Ooh. Yeah, that's the greatest ever, right? That is one of the all-time greatest quotes. J.B.S. Haldane's, not only is the universe queerer than you suppose, it's queerer than you can suppose. That's my number one favorite. But number two, right up there nice because it is i

mean mccloughlin was right what are we doing we're making we're making computers and we keep making better ones and we keep we we're essentially the evolutionary device that that causes the 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, McLuhan will be right. And then a new life form will be birthed out of our greasy little hands. Not ours, obviously. Yeah, I think that's right. 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.

Yeah, most likely. 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 like sort of, he's a curmudgeon a bit. He's an intelligent guy, but his criticism of Kurzweil was basically a biological criticism of 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 are,

there's no way we'll be able to recreate that because our ideas of human 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 it 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 and proteins. And I mean, that is, 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? Does that make sense?

I mean, it makes sense. I feel like I'm not enough of a specialist on artificial general intelligence to really know the difference. The problem is I don't think anybody is. I mean, there's a bunch of people that are working really hard at it, but no one's ever done it. So if you haven't done it, how the fuck are you an expert? I mean, if there's not an artificial human being that is state-of-the-art version 7.0, capable of compassion, understands its actions.

Hopefully it will be. Well, it has to be, right? Otherwise, we're going Terminator style. That's right. Right. That's the real question, though. Sort of like the way we did nuclear power before we learned how to shut off nuclear power plants. Like, I hope they don't do that with artificial intelligence.

Like, well, let's just get this thing up and running, and then we'll figure out a way to give it emotions. Yeah. Like, I hope they don't do that with artificial intelligence. Like, well, let's just get this thing up and running and then we'll figure out a way to give it emotions. Yeah, no, I mean, that's what scares me a little with the AI stuff is that it's so much focused on the rational thought process. And yet, you know, my experience of being human is that that's barely part of my human experience. Occasionally I'm rational. I have thoughts, but mostly I'm just like reacting to things and emotional. And, you know, I don't even know what, what's running most of my processes. Yeah. That is an issue, right? Yeah. And I think it's also interesting to see just, um, 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 that 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 this along the way, we've sort of developed this, 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 emerged because so many people are like, wow, my fucking head's all over the place. I'm, this is, 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 me, 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 a very unwelcome way where your day can be burdened by the past or you could be in the – like 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 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, 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 more 3D printers or hell it's going to be, you know, when we become more, you know, 3D printers or whatever it's going to be when we become biological copies or artificial biology. Like, what are we and what is life? Yeah. Those are really important questions. I guess. I guess.

I think 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 used the term body downloading. So why is it that you can upload your, you know, 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, you know, I think there's part of us that wants to transcend the limits of being human, you know, and it's the same thing that drives the Buddhist meditators to seek for enlightenment. You know, 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.

even if we're able to upload our patterns into the cloud, we still, if there's still beings who have a sense of themselves and have some sort of physical substrate, 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. it's still 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 um super intelligence 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 use. And I, then there's things are objects outside of me and some of them I want and some of them I don't want and some of them are 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 but isn't the experience I mean if you really stop to think about true enlightenment and being completely and 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 that's a creature that has no existential issues they they don't have any angst in terms of their future their past they 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 we're doing all these different things we're going to bio hacking 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 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 like why leave it better for them and what what are they doing they're just leaving it better for the next at the end of the day what are we doing we're just enhancing this giant super organism 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 like what you know these this the existential angst of being of being conscious of being able to recognize that this is kind of like at the end of the day like what this is just a weird little trip you're on you know you're on a birth-to-death trip and

what 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 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 becomes so intelligent

that it's like, we're not doing shit, okay? I'm not doing nothing. Why would I do anything? Like, 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, you know? 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 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 like what has created everything that we have everything that we have every 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 this this thing that has allowed us to radically reshape our environment that has allowed us to design cities and 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? Well, I would say the ultimate question for me would be who are we?

Yeah, what are we? Yeah, or what? 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, 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 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 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? That keeps us grounded. I think that's really important as well, transcend and include. Yeah, I just wonder what would happen

if we eliminated all of our biological urges and would things just completely stop? Why would anybody create art if we don't want to impress other folks? Well, I think if we have a choice, maybe some individuals would choose to eliminate those things and maybe some would choose not to, right? Not to, right? Yeah. What if there's like a huge diversity, it's not just one thing that we become? What if it's like many things and people just kind of decide to go off and reprogram their consciousness in various ways? Well, I've always been fascinated by this idea of constant improvement. And it's sort of what fuels modern corporations, this idea of constant growth. It fuels human beings. No one is happy with where they are.

They want a bigger house. They want a better car. They want, if they're an artist, they want to create their latest, greatest masterpiece. They don't want to sit on their laurels. They want to consistently, constantly improve. Where's the iPhone 6? I'm still waiting on that. Waiting, I'm waiting. Yeah. 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, they start, like if you've 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 it's incredibly fascinating that they've developed this need to figure out how to trick animals so they can continue to breed they've improved they've innovated and that's that if you could really talk to a butterfly and go listen dude you only live a week why fuck what do you care like 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 oh look at the butterfly and then it's over like let a bunch of lizards eat you let's 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 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 there's just this it's part of this process this continue to innovate constantly push forward make things better if we stop being biological, does everything just stop?

Does everything just, and did, you know, what, 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. Sure. 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 everyone else is left behind? You know, what good is it if we're, you know, living the high life and there are millions of people who are struggling to feed themselves? You know, at some level, when we get in touch with the reality of that, there's part of us, if our hearts are open, you know, 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. Like it's not just this experience that's important. There are all these others, you know, that are also having an experience and they're not unlike me, you know, and that's why compassion can exist because I realized like 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 um this you know common hopes and fears um desires um and so in that sense you know i think compassion is a really powerful force that also holds life together and keeps it from flinging apart into the into the ethers but the cynical 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 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. So 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 that is based almost entirely on those same ideas like the the lack of compassion for your fellow beings exhibited like if you looked at the one thing or you ask 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, 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 a, there is this feeling of this is, 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 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 where did that what was that that it all came from? This nothing, this infinitely small point in space. Actually, the Big Bang isn't something that happened in the past. It's something that is happening right now. It's something that the, 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 heart and our own deepest mind. But does it really? 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 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. I think you're speaking to our habitual patterns that get ingrained in us as we grow up. And with the Buddhist training that I've

been through, it really does teach us how to start to deconstruct some of that training i mean compassion naturally arises in a moment's notice without there being this strong sense of like contraction around our small sense of self you know when your child reaches for the stove you're going to try to jerk it back because you don't want it to burn itself right that's a level of compassion that's naturally arising so well that's that's also being uh you're in a mentor role you're teaching this human being about things that it doesn't understand yet i would think of more of compassion as someone you have no biological connection to at all and you see them in need of help and you help and there's something that's inherently satisfying about that um when you do help someone it's very strange like me and my friend todd were driving we were in north

carolina we were driving down the road and we saw this car it had like um it's hazards on but they were like really really dim and it was on the side of the road and uh as we passed the car maybe a couple hundred yards later we saw a guy lying on his back and we went oh shit something happened so we stopped the car we got out we helped the guy we called 9-1-1 we got the guy up he had severe asthma his car ran out of gas and he he had an asthmatic attack and fell and and we spent a bunch of time with this guy and the cops and and after it was over we had this feeling. The guy was safe. The guy was, you know, they got him in an ambulance.

They took him to the hospital. The whole thing was resolved. And we had this elation, this light feeling of happiness that we did something. Yeah, we were tired and we'd just flown in and we would rather just go to our hotel. But instead, we spent an hour or so and we felt way better you know it's like this feeling of elevation you've helped your fellow being right so it's naturally programmed

in us and so therefore we can continue to cultivate that and so it's more of a consistent state that's present that's what i've learned 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 and 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, I mean, in that sense, like, 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. That connection is undeniable. Yeah. And it's fascinating when you see people change the people that they hang around with. Yeah. And they all of a sudden improve or regress and that's that's a consistent pattern with human beings you find a really good group of friends are super healthy and like to do a lot of exciting fun things and

their compassion to each other and you start mimicking that behavior or at least mirroring that behavior right or when you're around people that are just complete messes so we don't have to be ruled by our biological desires so when you're saying people that are just complete messes. So we don't have to be ruled by our biological desires. So when you're saying 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. Yeah, but my question remains, when you remove all these biological urges, what is the purpose of this thing? Because it doesn't seem to me that there would be any reason to go on

if you removed everything biological. And that's just, yeah, that's just something. I mean, you can think like that. But what would be any reason to go on if you removed everything biological. And that's just, yeah, that's just something. I mean, you can think like that. But what would be the purpose? I think it's hard to know. I mean, this is my point of view. It's hard to know because we don't know what it would be like to be that, to be whatever that is.

Our minds go and try to construct it all. 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. We'll be no need for podcasts. Well, we can get together in the instantaneous mind meld, which is intelligence and riff on this. That, to me, seems more likely than any of those other scenarios i i i wonder like what the next step is i've stopped many times and i've spent like entire days thinking about a thousand years from today to

a thousand years from now like what is 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 going to figure out some way that the human mind

can access other states, dimensions, levels of consciousness that literally the human body will be irrelevant. Well, it already can. Oh yeah. We already can access all kinds of crazy states. That's some of the things that I've learned in meditation,

you know, it's. Or psychedelics. Psychedelics. Open that up pretty quickly. Right. But what's going on there? What is that?

Do we know? What is that? 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 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. Disillusioned with it, huh? No, not at all. No, just completely offering the devil's advocate point of view. Yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate that. I mean, I think that point of view is coming at it from the biological, physical perspective. Yeah. is coming at it from the biological physical perspective yeah but then there's also the

perspective of consciousness itself you know of the experiential aspect of it um which is i think also a part of the challenge of our moment in time i think is is starting to recognize that both of these perspectives are valid that the the perspective of consciousness of experience is is also valid so from the perspective of consciousness of experience is is also valid so from the perspective of consciousness you know those altered states of experience reveal something valid now whether or not you know 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 you know areas are de-afferentiating and then these areas are lighting up and all that stuff but that's not

who we that's not all of who we are we're not just brains right um because you know we're having thoughts about brains and the only way brains exist is through our through our internal representations of brains and in 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 when you take a hallucinogenic medicine with the intention of learning more about 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.

at the level of consciousness itself that you know you can't convince a skeptic or a cynic that they're true but you can give them the instructions and say hey run this program and see what happens um and and and if you do it with a certain kind of intention then you know it it changes your life it changes your perspective it changes your sense of who you are you know and what this is all about and i appreciate that you're pointing out, you know, the one side of it, which is that, you know, yeah, this is a limited trip. Like, 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. I don't know why. I don't know why it's happening. Right. I don't know why.

I don't know why it's happening. Right. And then, like, we're going to die, you know, 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, like, in-your-face shock about that that I think we're constantly coping with as human beings. You know, we're constantly. And compassion can be a way to cope with that you know and and love like there's a term that uh this tibetan master used who came to the america in the 70s named chuggyam trunkba 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 don't you can't actually deal with it so you try to like make it go away or you try to oh poor you poor you you know 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 like what's going to happen in 50 to a hundred years from now. Um, does that make sense?

Sort of. I always felt like compassion was just the way that we kept together, that we kept our love for each other and bonds and 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, 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 and in a relatively sane way are these essentially man-created technologies human-created technologies to mitigate the natural world i mean in a way they clearly are i mean because humans yeah sat under trees you know in india 2500 years ago thousands of years ago and explored their own own minds and did come up with various programs for how to work with experience. Isn't that fascinating that someone a long time ago was looking around, people hacking

each other to death of swords, and was like, there's got to be a way around some of this shit. What's going on here? What is going on? Why is everybody launching arrows over the top of those walls like what the fuck are we doing and why in india what the hell is going on in india yeah no india has been the birthplace of a lot of developments in consciousness not coincidentally worships cows who not coincidentally make cow shit from double undulate animals that psilocybin mushrooms grow on.

Completely connected for sure without a doubt. And Soma, you know, the ancient Vedic traditions and all these ancient Hindu texts that speak of these psychedelic drugs. We don't even know what the hell they were. These important psychedelic aspects of their culture that are completely lost like no one knows what soma is means it's a huge part of their ancient religious tradition and you know whatever it is is like completely up for debate some feel it's a combinatory drug with you know the amanita muscaria and psilocybin and all sorts of different things, but no one knows just all guesswork,

but that's gotta be a part of it. Right. Someone ate some mushrooms and said, those cows are awesome. We need to keep those guys around. Don't eat the cows. Eat this. Oh yeah.

Don't eat the cows. This came from the cows. Yes. Yeah. You know, like what a trip, bunch of starving people letting cows go because the cows make shit that mushrooms grow on yeah i mean i think it's crazy too that people figured out how

to to pay attention and 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 as a kind of baseline of existence well kundalini masters people that are really uh 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 do you like where how are you getting there it's just years and years and years of mindfulness and this very specific practice right concentration you know is the always tied to in

every contemplative tradition these sort of psychedelic or psychic experiences it's like the ability to focus and to 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. Some traditions, a lot of Buddhist traditions do sort of suggest not getting sidetracked by them. Yeah. But they inform us and change the way that we can relate to things.

So they are important. Yeah. But they're not the end goal. They can definitely do a lot of good work. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of weird shit. Oh, yeah.

I mean, sorcery, like in Tibet, you know. You know, there's like all these people like out there like casting weird stuff at each other. And, you know, I don't, I haven't been to Tibet, so I don't know how much of it is like you can just see weird stuff happening and how much of it is their mythology. But all the same, like there's enough weird stories coming out of places of people that have been sitting in caves for, you know, millennia, exploring their own consciousness. So we're already uploading. I mean, we've been, I guess, uploading at least in some level. Well, the artwork itself is representative of these experiences. If you look at Tibetan artwork, it's so trippy.

It's mind-blowing. So psychedelic. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. 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. What do you mean by there were mostly dudes that were able to do this? Well, I mean, the 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 you know the organization of their cultures but there's not a biological limitation in achieving these experiences no actually the tibetans say women uh have an easier time at these practices. Yeah, I would imagine that because testosterone is so controlling and limiting in that sense.

There's so much ego bound to testosterone and also the mortality of testosterone, like being the one that survives and all that is inexorably sort of connected to the sex hormone over the male. I would imagine that that would be more limiting. Emily is a better meditator than I am. I practice twice as hard and experience half the results. Do you guys ever go in sensory deprivation tanks? I have not done that. I haven't done that yet.

How dare both of you? I know. I know. 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 like 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 you're sitting in silence most of the time like it really does limit the sensory input right um 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 how could you say that though if you haven't done it if you haven't done the actual tank itself? Oh, I don't know how it compares exactly, but I know what it's like to experience a lack of sensory input.

Right. At least on a certain level. On a certain level that there's no sense of visual sight, sound. It's actually probably deeper because there's no sense of the body at all in those states. It's completely formless. Deeper than what? Deeper than if you're laying in a tank and you still have an experience of the senses of your body like if you can still feel your body can you feel your body in a sensory deprivation tank no that's the whole point okay

so it's probably similar more intense this is why i've done both and the sensory deprivation tank you're weightless we'll have to do it You're floating in water that's the same temperature as your skin. So you don't recognize where the water ends and your body completely ceases to send information to you. Yeah. And if you guys are already good at meditating, meditating in a tank would be like turbocharged. Probably right.

100% guaranteed. I can't believe you haven't done it. Why don't you have a sponsor yet for sensory deprivation checks? I have one in my basement. I have a tank in my basement. I go in that sucker all the time. You need a new advertiser here, I think. Well, I sort of help my friend Crash, who owns the float lab in Venice,

but I don't do it for financial compensation. I just do it because I want people to know about it. But I retweet people's tanks all the time that I have no affiliation with whatsoever, just because I think it's a massively important tool that has somehow or another slipped through the fingers of our consciousness. I don't get how people haven't grabbed a hold of that and ran with it. 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 um 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 um those people are weak yeah they're just scared but i'm just saying yeah i mean that and it can be scary for people 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 like expand and upload into different states and realms of being. But that fear of expansion, that's just the ego that's all that is that's

just your body trying to reclaim like some sort of walls let's let's put boundaries on this sucker so we can clearly define it where you know 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 that the boundaries all dissolve and like i remember one of the first times that i did a really potent psychedelic was five 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 um

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. There's air and there's always something there. There's no nothing. It doesn't exist. There's no nothing. There's no nothing anywhere. Even nothing is something.

Yeah, I know 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 um in a sense there's no thing um that even goes beyond all of that it's just this you know it's just this happening that's happening well the universe also is like a soup it's not like uh you're not throwing a ball through the air and someone's catching it. It's not hitting anything. It's not a vacuum.

Like the whole thing is just it's filled with something. It's all connected. Like you and I aren't really separate from each other. We're just not touching skin. But we're touching something that's touching us. And that, you know, we're all feeling that's touching us it's in that you know we're all feeling that boy that sounds hippie oh that's a maybe shit but it's but it's also true yeah in some way it's also true and that these 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 um to manage it transform it yes i would say transform it to what though i don't have a good answer to what. That's kind of looping back around where we started this conversation to what. Right. But isn't that like building a house and you don't have plans? Like, what are you doing?

I'm just putting shingles on this thing and it's going to hopefully be something. I think having, I mean, I think we each have to answer that question to what. I mean, and that's. It's a very personal thing in that way, I think we each have to answer that question to what? It's a very personal thing in that way, I think. I mean, I think it's personal in one way, but it's also collective in another way. Because we influence each other and we get attracted to things that are connected with what's important to us. But I think what's beautiful is to move toward deeper sense of wisdom, to move toward being able to live in harmony with that realization of interconnectivity, of the kind of profound interconnectivity that you're describing. That literally at some level 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, you know, take that experience and begin to dismantle habits and ideas and beliefs that are opposed to that experience and actually begin to live, you know, more in harmony to, you know more in harmony to you know in the kind of language of contemplative training to embody that realization to make it your own um you know and to and to make your life an expression of that you know expression of that interconnectivity and compassion and deep care and love for each other and including you know cutting through all the and including calling out the delusion you including pimp smacking the bullshit, which is, I think, a big part of what I see you doing here. And I would just say leaving room for the what to change.

That's not like a fixed thing that we're going to transform into this fixed thing. We're going to continue to change and to evolve. And so that's beautiful to me. 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, there's a guy that we talked about on this podcast before

that got bitten by a shark, this 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 a shark, but lucky for you, this is 2014, and we have some incredible innovation that we've created that's going to allow you to have this leg that moves very much like a regular leg. And you're going to 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 going to get better. Five years from now, we'll have a better arm and a better leg, and you're going to enjoy this. Well, if as time goes on, the other parts of his body start failing like oh 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 and then but they're going to work great okay great okay listen man your heart is going uh 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 artificial brain.

Well, what's left of you? 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 are, you know, 2.0, what goes on there? Well, from a Buddhist perspective, what's there is your karma. What's there is the pattern that was you leading up to that point. You know, the information that made you up and that has continued to move into this new substrate. And that pattern has a momentum to it. It has a history. It has memories.

It has beliefs. It has, you know, it has various things. It's not a complete discontinuity. The substrates change, but the pattern has continued in some sense, right? Maybe. But 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?

I guess it depends on how it's constructed. 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 is aged. Do you ever have that experience? I do. In what way? Just like, you know, you just, there's part of you that hasn't aged.

And then at the same time, if you look at the mirror, you can tell that you've aged. Does that make sense? There's a piece of us. Right. That's like, I don't know. I still feel like nothing's changed. Inside. Inside.

But your vehicle. But my, but then I look in the mirror and I'm like, oh my gosh. Yeah. Like I gotta, I gotta, my time is ticking even though I'm young,

you know, but I, I get that. So there's this like paradox kind of at play. So when we're talking about like, what, 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. Well, if we'd stop aging, I mean, if it completely ends or if it's a temporary aging, we just got to go and get repainted. the temporary aging, we just got to go and get repainted. You know, I mean, if your car gets a patina from, you know, rocks and chips on the road and stuff, all you have to do is bring it to the body shop and they can, it's old cars that look awesome. You know, we can't do that with a human being, but if we can, there's, you know, there's companies that specialize in replacing every single part of an old car and creating you a new version of an old car that that is ultimately incredibly possible for a human being i think that's possible that's crazy though you know and there is this part of us that wants to live forever i mean the holy

growl like some of these myths have existed for a long time so everybody wants to sleep but nobody wants to die yeah it's quite fascinating everybody's more than happy to shut off for eight hours like just oh yeah here we go nothing 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 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 our one of our zen teachers who 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. 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 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. Well, also, what if death is merely a transitionary phase? What if you live in this existence, but when you die, you will enter into a new existence?

And this is what many ancient religions have speculated on throughout the beginning of time. I mean, since the beginning of time. Everyone thinks that there's some sort of, I mean, whether it's wishful thinking or whatever it is, it might be real. Just like consciousness is a very bizarre thing to try to define, but it is certainly a real thing. You know, if you tried to put consciousness in a lab and say like, what is it that causes creativity? What is it that would define love in some sort of a chemical process? Good luck with that. Good luck with trying to figure out what that warm feeling is when you see your friend at the airport.

It reminds me of that Time Magazine cover that says they couldn't find the God particle. Do you remember that? Yeah. In the brain. They can't find it. Yeah. Well, what is it? 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 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 those chemicals, why are they released at the moment of death? Why are they released at the moment of extreme stress when 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? Like 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 left it back there in that fucking robot. And who would be conscious of that if there was no consciousness?

Yeah, well, what is it? What is that thing? What is the life? What is the life that gets that transitions? The life expires, the light goes out, and you pass over, but yet this robot wakes up and it's you.

It has no lifespan. It has no whatever, no sexual urges, no need for for community it's just this thing that has all of your memories i hope you don't i hope you don't design the future ai well we have real problems if we design it to mimic and replicate biological life we have real problems there i think we'd have real problems if we didn't too, right? That's true as well. Well, the biological us would. Yeah.

Because that's where the Terminator comes in. It has no need for us. Yeah. Everything that we are as far as the way our society is structured, as far as our senses of fairness and love and compassion, they're all based on biological urges and needs. The need for community is a strong urge to keep us all together so we stay alive longer. I mean, all of these things are a part of being a biological entity. And when we no longer are, why would we engineer all those biological urges and thoughts and concepts into this carbon fiber creation. I've heard the argument, and I think this is interesting too, though, that, you know,

the need for community goes back to the very earliest moments of the universe. You know, that in some sense, you know, when atoms emerged, they emerged in collectives. You know, 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. But isn't also the sense of competition then? Because all biological life is this wild race of things eating things. Birth and death.

Including vegetarians. 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 you're you're doing when you wash yourself you're killing living things there's a lot of weirdness to this 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. Absolutely. I mean, it's a paradox, too, in a way. But isn't that part of what's cool about being alive, is that it's not going to last? I mean, that's one of the big issues with the transhumanist movement, this idea of transcending the biological limitations and living forever. But then it sucks. It's like a movie that's 100 hours long.

I don't want to see Star Wars for 100 hours. I want to see Star Wars for two hours because at the end of two hours, it's awesome. Like, that was a great movie. Yay. You walk outside. You're in the sunlight. You talk about how great that moment was with your friends everybody's happy but if star wars is goes on for infinity it fucking sucks you know for you know a hundred years later still going warp speed and chewbacca's like

fucking get me out of here this is terrible this movie sucks you know why because it's boring i don't want to see it for a hundred hours i want to see it for two. Is that life itself? you know that become again and and this this ties in with the question you know that we've asked ourselves you know with with the the buddhist practice like is enlightenment an end state or is it an ongoing ever unfolding process you know and i think if it is an unfolding ever evolving process then that means there will always be as long as there's stuff there will always be limitations there will always be something that's not quite as perfect as there's stuff, there will always be limitations. There will always be something that's not quite as perfect as it could be, or that, you know, is not quite it. And so in that sense, I would guess that, I mean, this is my guess, it's not that we would transcend limitations

altogether, but that we'll transcend certain ones and then discover new ones. And then the whole process of creative tension will begin again at some new you know level and we'll be like oh shit like i i really don't appreciate the fact that i can't have two experiences simultaneously that i've there's just one experience even if i can move between multiple realms really rapidly i still can only have this one moment of experience you know then what i and that's just a guess, maybe one of the limitations. Well, that's fascinating. You bring that up because that does open up a different realm of possibilities. If we can transcend the limitations of biology, and that includes the entire human race that's on the same track, experience it all simultaneously. And that this is beyond the realm of biological understanding and maybe that's where we evolve from this thing and become

something that's far more complex and complicated unless unless one aspect of that decides it doesn't want to be merged into the whole and then you get warring factions warring factions of transhumanism trying to pull each other's Factions. Warring factions. We'll just recreate our problems. On a much larger scale. Warring factions of transhumanisms trying to pull each other's batteries out. And trying to pull each other into each other's version of utopia. Yeah, right? That's another issue, right? Like, what if there's, like, 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, you know, Betamax was better, but VHS survived. And you got to pick the right team. That's right. Yeah. There's different. Yeah, because it's not like there's going to be only one company that comes up with a transhumanist solution, right? Right.

This is reminding me of like the fluidity of perspectives as I've trained and practiced. It's like the mind, it 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 and not have the right way or the way. So there's a lot of possibilities. Yeah. so there's a lot of possibilities yeah the what you said also that's fascinating is this idea that we we can't even really imagine what the potentials are because the potentials will create new potentials that were before that unrecognizable we we didn't 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. Siri. Yeah. Try to explain that to people that live 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. The hive mind? Yeah. The idea that we're going to somehow or another experience each other on some very, very broad scale. Some very large scale. And I think we're kind of doing that with shit like Facebook and with Twitter and with interaction on the internet. I think what we're doing is dipping our toe in the ocean of connectivity.

Oh, yeah. I like that phrase. Yeah. That's really good. Yeah, because I think that we're slowly but surely dissolving. Or devolving. Maybe that, too. Biologically devolving, right? But dissolving these limitations of communication.

We're slowly but surely expressing ourselves in ways and interacting in ways that didn't exist before. And then when new things come along, like, are you aware of Oculus Rift? Yeah. I've got the dev kit too waiting for me in North Carolina. I can't wait. Duncan has it. My friend Duncan Trussell has it. And he just got back from experiencing porn in virtual reality, first-person porn, and he goes, it is the craziest thing you've ever experienced in your life.

Like, you are this other person having sex with someone. You could look down at your body, you could look at your feet and your legs, and you can experience, like, sexual intercourse with somebody. You don't feel it, obviously, but he's like, this is going to change the entire world we live in. And the version of it is insanely high definition right you know he keeps like you gotta come over my house try out the fucking new rift man it's it's mind-blowing he called me up the day he saw it he's like he's like this is bigger than the internet because this is bigger than anything that's ever been invented by people yeah i've heard the same thing and i

mean the thing i'm most excited about is creating contemplative training environments in the rift. What would it be like to completely, like you said, immerse yourself in a visual field with nothing outside of it and be able to, in some sense, experience some of the same states that psychedelics bring on, but directly through a technological interface. One of my friends called it technodelics, the sense that technology could produce some of the states as well. 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 like, put this on. Virtual reality. Put this, yeah, that one day the state will, I mean,

the virtual reality will achieve the type of possibilities to achieve something like that. Yeah, and then the question becomes, you know, and I think McKenna said this, you know what what worlds do we build you know what what virtual realities do we build and what values do we build into them and program into them you know because i don't think that issue is going to go away we still have to ask those questions and and decide what we're building well again that's the big the real mind fuck it's it's not even essentially that, you know, like 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. You know, 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 your 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 i don't i'm not if it is an experience and you're 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 mean, that's my presumption. That we're in an artificial reality? I mean, I presume this is a virtual reality simulation. Why is that? Because stuff's happening and I don't know what's happening. What do you mean by that? I mean, I guess we were watching Nick Bostrom last night kind of lay out the argument for this, you know, the virtual reality simulation hypothesis.

And he was basically saying, you know, one possibility is in we're in a virtual reality an ancestral simulation and then the other possibility is that no technology no no civilizations get to the point technologically where they can produce this kind of technology they all vanish that's one possibility um and then the third possibility was i'll see if i can remember it i don't understand that possibility. So basically saying this is a real universe because no civilizations get to, so there could be no civilization which gets to the point where it develops that capacity, that virtual reality technology.

But how is that even an option? No civilization does it. You could say no civilization has. Yeah, no civilization has. So because he's assuming that if someone does do it, this is getting kind of analytically geeky. So is this whole damn show, right?

Yeah, that's true. But I think he's saying if a hyper-intelligent species can create a virtual reality, they will. And they'll create many of them. And so probability-wise, it's much more likely that we're in a simulation because of how many that could be created.

You could simulate an infinite number of universes through a hyper next-generation computer. So that was his argument for why we're probably in a simulation. I would never say probably. 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. That's why it's not there yet. That we just haven't reached it yet. Yeah, it seems way more likely. 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 uh you know old like beethoven music and old uh music from the 50s like buddy holly type shit and comparing it to what people are doing today whether 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, that as

far as what we can observe, that things are, we have more ability, we're more competent, we're more able to alter our environment, communicate, etc. more able to alter our environment, communicate, etc. Our technology is 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 won'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? That doesn't make any sense. I don't assume that myself, i mean i think i one one thing i'd throw in the ring is you know that way of looking at our history is sort of like a linear

model right like right we've kind of 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 we're at this sort of linear progression of evolution unfolding but that story is only like 200 years old right so why would we assume that that story is accurate um or that that way of looking at it's accurate i mean it seems more likely that in 100 years we'll have a completely completely different conception of what the universe is. And I wonder if part of that conception or part of what will break down, and I'll tie this back into the contemplative tradition because this is, 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, for the Zen, 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 and so in that sense you know the uh as 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 like on occasions experience it that way but

for the most part that is not the way i, I tend to think this is a linear thing. That's like, this got to start and it'll have an end. Well, the number one mind fuck of all time is infinity. And being, being that not only is infinite, like I think,

especially when your children, you know, like, you know, the kids will say something like, you know, I win times infinity. You know what,

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, 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 in the exact same order with the exact events, the exact same words, and every possible variation in between. So different words, different events, different forms of expression, different languages arise, different conquerors win.

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's it is happening all at once it's just the container that holds it in is infinite it's it is a physical manifestation of this concept and and okay 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 that's the mind fuck if you wake up and you're in this other you

somewhere else in the multiverse and you know your decisions and choices allow you to travel from one potential to the next but wherever you left off where you've ever 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. And then in some timelines you didn't. Not in this timeline. Well, maybe not yet. Maybe you will after this conversation.

You know what I mean? I mean, like, 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 from each other physically to us but not their potential is very different and that in a sense you are dimension traveling. And that's why we sleep.

So we can travel. That's why people say sleep on it. Sleep on your problems, man. Maybe they'll go away in the morning and you're just going to transfer to another stage of you somewhere else in the universe. Or maybe this is more hippie bullshit. Damn it.

I hate it. 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 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 1% 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. That's what those Tibetans thought as they sat in a cave and just explored their own minds.

They were tripping balls. They were probably taking something. Were they? They were tripping on concentration. They were tripping on endogenous drugs. Yeah, that's the thing. The endogenous drugs. You're tripping even if you're not tripping.

Like, you have to. Everybody does. There's no way around it. You're tripping when you're sleeping. I had some trippy dreams last night. Yeah. Totally. Yeah.

Those are trips. Absolutely. They are. This is a trip. This is a trip. Yes. Sure. I'm definitely tripping right now.

I think a lot of people listening are tripping, too. What? There's people right now on a subway going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Everything is happening everywhere all the time like the concept of infinity like no no no this is the this is a unique moment this unique not not not really well if you drop the concept of infinity then everything's happening right now yes well for you everything is happening right now but the concept of infinity is undeniable mathematically that's the problem is that like you can't just ignore the like 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 seem equally ridiculous to try to reach and if you got to those there's no end you just you're going to keep going and going and going so all the evidence of infinity at least of the concept of great great distance being outside of the realm of understanding is all it's right in front of us yeah every night every moment yeah at the at the same time i think there's a way of experiencing

infinity that isn't about distance it's about uh consciousness and infinity being you know this conscious experience that we're having right now right right? The room that we're seeing, the sounds that we're hearing, the body sensations that we're having, all of these are also arising in our experience, right? In our awareness. And the idea of infinite distance is a thought that arises in my awareness. And so in some sense, there's only this awareness, there's only this experience that we've ever had.

And so in that sense, the idea, the concept of infinity as a distance, as a great distance drops away and there's just this, there's just this one moment that's happening. I think that's what you're pointing to. And there's an infinite quality to it in terms of that that the consciousness itself is is infinitely present it's infinitely here i don't know how to describe it actually that the consciousness is infinitely present throughout the whole thing it it's undeniably the fact that we are conscious you know just like you, the infinity is undeniable.

Consciousness is undeniable. This is happening. You cannot deny this is happening. But isn't it though because there's levels of consciousness, right? 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. Aren't they conscious as well? And isn't that consciousness like a very limited consciousness?

conscious as well and isn't that consciousness like a very limited consciousness and as consciousness expands what's the what's the ongoing theme when we're talking about meditation and meditative practices enlightenment yeah achieving the psychedelic states through consciousness adjustment or consciousness manipulation like there's levels and layers to the whole thing yeah there 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, 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. 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 yeah everywhere worldwide the the like universe wide web or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, if the universe is infinite, and most scientists agree it is, or they believe it is, many do. I mean, it's one of those things where you have the observable universe, right, which is like 14 billion light years or something like that. And then what we talked about with the Big Bang, like it all came out of what, like McKenna had the, the, the best take on the big bang.

He's like, science is essentially saying, allow us this one miracle and we'll explain everything. And that's really what it is. The whole universe came from something smaller than the head of a pin. How? Um, let me get back to you on that,

but it did. And because of that, all this stuff's here. Is that a miracle? I wouldn't use that word. Yes, it is. That's a fucking miracle, man. If a guy can come back from the dead after three days, that ain't shit. The universe came out of the head of a pin.

You don't think that's more impressive than a dude coming back from the dead? The guy coming back from the dead is clearly a miracle from dead is clearly a miracle can we agree on that walking on water clearly a miracle right water in a wine the motherfucker made a miracle right the universe itself is a miracle all of our stories about it are miracles yes 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. 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. Yeah, that's the mind fuck to me yeah it's our myth it's our our isis that's our zeus that's our you know that's our odin it's like the big bang yeah

it's just it's and one day they'll laugh at us these fucking dummies thought that the universe was smaller than the head of a pin and that whatever whatever man, it just blew up and became the universe. Yeah, one day soon, probably. Yeah, maybe, right? Maybe. Or at least in terms of reference, it'll be similar to Galileo to us. Yeah. You know, Galileo thinking that the universe was not centered around the earth

and everybody going what are you fucking crazy and this is like a big form point of contention and now it's universally agreed that galileo was correct and everybody else is being silly like there may very well come a day when someone proposes something far more radical than the big bang that proves to be true and everybody and everybody else is like wait wait what are you saying hold on hold on hold on like have you ever seen that um there's an uh an audio of uh i think his name is uh gates and um william gates the guy who had the the concept of uh a simula he has a simulation theory um that he presented to Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah.

Yeah. That was the president's scientific advisor, Obama's advisor for a while. Was he really? William Gates, yeah. No kidding. If it's the same guy. It's the same guy that found the computer code in straight theory. He's sort of like a Samuel L. Jackson lookalike.

Yes. That's him. That's him. And the conversation that he has with Neil deGrasse Tyson, where he says they found self-correcting computer code in the heart of string theory. Yeah. And then Neil deGrasse Tyson goes,

wait, wait, wait, okay, okay, okay. I want to hear this again. Say this one more time. You found self-correcting... I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying. Pull the video because that's... We watched this for the first time last night. Oh, really?

Yeah. Oh, this is one of my favorites. I got taken down. I got to find out. That link got taken down? It was on Reddit. Goddamn commies. Who's doing that?

Why would you take that down? Just self-correcting computer code. Correcting. Computer code. Correcting. Computer code string theory. Gates. Let's see. Yeah, that's it.

Strange computer code discovered concealed. If you just go to that, I found it. Just do what I just did. I found it again. Okay. 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 da da da. Here, play it. 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 here 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. Wait, you're blowing my mind at this moment.

So you're saying, 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. That is correct. So the... Wait, wait. I'm still...

Wait. I have to just be silent for a minute here. So you're saying as you dig deeper, you find computer code writ in the fabric of the cosmos? Into the equations that we want to use to describe the cosmos, yes. Computer code? Computer code, strings of bits of ones and zeros. It's not just sort of resembles computer code, you're saying it is computer code. It's not even just is computer code, it's a special kind of computer code, you're saying it is computer code. It's not even just is computer code, it's a special kind of computer code that was invented

by a scientist named Claude Shannon in the 1940s. That's what we find very deeply inside the equations that occur in string theory and in general in systems that we can say are supersymmetric. Okay. Time to go home, I think. symmetric. Time to go home, I think. Where are we going to go? So are you saying we are all just, there's some entity that programmed the universe and

we're just expressions of their code? 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? Please! Yes! 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 flow of time in it. It just is. And this means... But Lee... Wait, wait, let him finish. Wait, wait,

let him finish. Wait, I need him here and now. This means that 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? These are differential equations. Then you lay the solution out. You keep using the word is and I'm talking about the word describe.

Describe is fine. Let me finish 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 it's a supersymmetrical universe, which we're 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. I can't. Can't go on. Show's over. What do you say to that? 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 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 you know 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, it's the mind tendency is to lock down on the variables but then it locks it down so it's constantly changing what do you mean by that meaning that we have there's a tendency of mine to like to go into concepts as if they were solid and as if they were fixed and as if they were fixed. And any kind of time that we do that, we lock down the possibility. So if we can relax into whatever it's representing, then that representation can continue to be fluid. And so therefore, there's a lot of space and a lot of room to continue.

And the present moment is not just one thing. I just don't understand the argument that if mathematics are, if it's, 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, you could, 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 there they don't exist because this is artificial but they exist because nature essentially runs on mathematics so is nature artificial or is it what i don't think anything is artificial or you could say everything's artificial yeah well everything is natural there's like everything on earth including like artificial chemicals were produced from things that are naturally occurring on earth

and human beings are a natural creation of the earth or of biological life itself and all the byproducts of human beings including things that we consider to not be natural are natural just like a beehive is a natural creation of a bee you know nuclear waste is the natural creation of the inquisitive human being. They're not natural, but they are natural because everything is natural. They don't exist outside of our manipulation, but we are a part of nature. So essentially all of our creations are in fact natural. 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 know

you could you could say the same thing like everything is artificial everything is generated from something else you know the big bang, came from somewhere, 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. Like everything is artificial and everything is natural. Yeah. Everything is natural. I think it's, we have this idea of natural and artificial that

we describe with our foods. You know, we describe it with our, the things that are healthy and non-healthy about what we've created in our culture. But it's when you start using those same terms to describe human creation, and then you start understanding the nature of human innovation and creativity in the first place like boy i don't know if that's natural or not how could it be any less natural than an octopus changing its shape to hide or you know changing its skin tone to blend in with the environment isn't that natural it's an artificial look that the octopus has created in order to camouflage itself from

predators or prey what do you what do you think people are really pointing to when they say something's unnatural like what do you think they're really getting at or really trying to say it's bad it's bad yeah we gotta go back in time let's go back to chopping wood and shit and it's bad according to what like according to what set of values or what conception of what the good is good in the universe right i think we're constantly instantiating our utopias through you know what we how we live and what we do and like we're constantly deluding ourselves into thinking our conception of the universe is the correct conception and and and but but like we can't help it like i cannot help but say you know i think this is the

most important thing compassion wisdom you know like i've got my own conception of what's most important but is there a most important i mean is the word most important the problem or the definition of most important the problem? Because what is most important to you is not most important to others. Right. It's like it's a very personal idea of what's most important. What's most important to starving people right now is getting them food and water. Right. What's most important to the president is figuring out what to do about Israel and Gaza.

What's most important? You know, there's, what's most important. You know, there's like, what is most important is a very personal thing. 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.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and again, it boils back to what is that collective code? What's the purpose of it all? Yeah. To facilitate society, civilization, and to move forward with the progression of innovation. Till we become robots. Till we figure out a way.

To get out of here. I mean, the trend is obviously there, right? The symbiotic connection that we have to, you know, you don't want to even leave your phone behind. You want to keep that sucker on you. If you leave it behind, you feel like you left a part of you back there. Yeah. Oh, my God, I left my hand.

You know, I got to go back and get my hand. I mean, it's almost similar. Yeah. Yeah. My outer cortex. Yeah. There's something weird to that. Yeah.

There's something weird to that yeah there's something that's something weird to our our desire that this marshall mccluhan'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 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 fuck it that's it just sits there so we show up on some planet someday and there's like 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 in buddhist cosmology actually it's described that way really yeah actually the uh there's six realms in the buddhist cosmology and one of the realms is the god realm and in the god realm the gods literally just abide in this formless awareness for like eons and eons and eons but at some point the story goes um something changes and they die they do have they also are born and die those formless realms aren't aren't permanent and so at some point they like come out of it and then they die then they get reborn into some other realm 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. Yeah. Because the very solar system they exist in is dependent upon that star burning a finite amount of fuel. Right. Whether it's 500 billion years or whatever the hell your star's got in its tank,

when that sucker's out it's getting a 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 physically traveling from dimension to dimension. Or traveling within the dimension of consciousness and looking for a resolution there. But doesn't it have consciousness once it becomes artificial? Is consciousness purely something that the universe has created

and we can't recreate? Oh, I doubt that. Really? Yeah. You think we'll be able to recreate consciousness i think if we i mean i'm this is just a kind of guess but i think if we create a suitable substrate for consciousness consciousness will appear and that's based on my assumption that consciousness appears where there's something happening. There's some sense of it occurring to something.

Well, it depends on what we're calling consciousness. Yeah. I use it in a simple way, like just basic awareness. Like just kind of the awareness of being in this room, of sight, of sound, of sensation. So animals and even insects have consciousness in that sense. And Alfred White Northead, you know, he sort of presumed that even atoms have a most fundamental sense of consciousness that he called prehension. And I don't know if that's kind of like a pantheistic perspective, but, um, I, I, I think everything is imbued at the most fundamental level with consciousness, but that's,

that's probably because I've been spent my whole life exploring consciousness. When you, when you say everything, do you mean like physical objects as well? Like a desk? Like does this desk have consciousness? Yeah. Like at the most basic level,

some form of, but non-measurable, so completely just theoretical. Consciousness is... Space and consciousness. Yeah, consciousness isn't, by definition, immeasurable. You can't measure consciousness because it's not a quantity. Right. Why would you assume that inanimate objects possess it then? of an object possess it then it's it's sort of just comes from us comes from the deepest states of meditation that i've experienced this kind of sense of knowing that everything is at the

most fundamental level consciousness itself and so that there isn't something outside of consciousness you know atoms couldn't exist outside of consciousness it's just it's just a felt sense i guess it's hard to describe like i don't have like a really solid argument for it and even if something appears solid at a very you know microscopic level we can see things moving around like even though this table feels solid it's not completely solid right of course yeah every atom is mostly air right or empty space rather 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 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, I guess it depends on how you look at it.

Because, no, I mean, I'm not changing it, and then, yes, I am changing it by doing those particular practices. You're changing it in that you're changing your perceptions, that your perceptions change the way you interface with it. Yeah. I think this goes back to the paradox of like it is very paradoxical yeah like the paradox of you know do we can we describe this from the outside objectively and like that's the most true perspective or do we describe it as as the subjective conscious experience of it you know

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, um, entirely. Otherwise you basically are just sort of propping up a particular perspective as the ultimate truth. Um, I don't know. I think there's something completely disenchanted about seeing everything as

physical objects and, and this as a kind of just like 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 you know the tendency for people to conflate their own experiences with the external universe as being like highly problematic too that's a funny word, disenchanted. That's a funny way of, because it is, you know, it is kind of, the way your perception of it is that,

it's almost like this mystical view of it, this beautiful airy fairy view of it it makes it more exciting and so like to think of them as to think of it in more stoic terms or more you know more um i don't know what the word i would use just more more clearly defined. It's like not as fun. Does that make sense? It does. It's also, I think, like Emily was saying, like the moment we solidify reality,

then like we lose the background, you know, we lose the sense that we don't actually completely know. That every story we've ever told, you know, as a species has ended up being wrong at some level. You know, it's not actually, like the Big Bang, you know. 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. something about certainty you know and really thinking we have it worked out that it becomes

problematic at some level that's kind of the beauty of existence right is that there's a lot of mystery to this thing yeah it's like half the half the fun exactly 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 it's it's that is real to be up in the mind and the brain and then forget that there is 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 in to play from some of the eastern traditions and then some of the western traditions because 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 concept, needing the rational mind, needing the science. And where is that balance in our modern world? I'm not sure. Well, yeah, that's the real question, right? Where is the balance in the modern world 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 our planet robbing it of its resources and polluting the oceans

and all that jazz that there isn't a balance to it all and that the experience is just what it is for you you you know you live this life and your perceptions and your ideas are essentially what flavor it for you and if you if you choose to be mr no nonsense you still die you know you live you die and that's it and you still have blind spots yeah you still you know limitations yeah Yeah. You still, you know. Limitations. Yeah, most certainly. 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.

And it may impact others around you because of your neurons and everything else. Yeah. Well, definitely, you know, when I'm around people that are super positive, I feel better. That's undeniable. I don't understand it, but I do. You know, inherently,

there's like a part of you that grasps it. But it's undeniable. And when you're around pessimistic people, it's a huge drag. That's a huge drag to be around super negative people. Like I remember I had this really negative girlfriend once when I broke up with her. I remember dropping her off and driving away going, oh, my God, I'm free. If there was a side of things that was negative, she would find it and just start pecking at it.

But what about that? Oh, it was brutal it was brutal and that that you know if you could find the opposite of that find someone who's always got a good take like hey this is what it is but from here well we can learn to never do that again so this is an awesome blessing in that we've learned a lesson from this. And we're going to move forward. And, you know, we still have love and community and friendship. And there's a lot of people that look at things that way. And they're so much more fun to be around.

It just makes the experience of life itself more exciting. And in that sense, what people are doing with Buddhism or TM or spending a lot of time in isolation tanks. It's sort of a workaround for biology, sort of a framework for developing your consciousness as you manage your biology. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think that's a valid way of talking about it. We might have run out of mind fucks in this podcast. a valid way of talking about it.

We might have run out of mind fucks in this podcast. I think we hit a wall when we were talking about self-correcting computer code. Like James Gates and Neil Tyson might have thrown us into a wall. It's just too... How did you guys get involved

in all this stuff? Like what made you like gravitate towards this as a young person? Is it just something you discovered early on and sort of slowly but surely it became a massive part of your life? I think for both of us, that's probably true.

I won't speak for Emily, but for me, I grew up with hippie parents, new agey parents. And so the notion of meditation and consciousness was kind of part of the dialectic growing up. Where'd you grow up? I grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. Ah, I love that place. That's where Duncan's from. Yeah, that's where we live now. You guys live there? Yeah. Place is so awesome. I don't want to tell people about it. So awesome. When I was there, I was walking down the street. I was like, this is like, it doesn't exist in anywhere else. The word's getting out. Believe me.

It is getting out. Damn it. And now it's really out. Yeah, now it's really out. But that place is amazing. That's an amazing, amazing town. It's quite interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, we love it. It's so unusual. Like, I was there with a buddy. Well, Duncan and another buddy of mine, we were walking down 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, very progressive, but very small.

What's the population there? 100K, I think. Is it? So it's very boulder-sized. That's right. Which is another similar town like that. Yeah. It's very, but you very boulder sized. That's right. Which is another similar town like that. Yeah.

It's very, but you guys are like tucked up in the mountains. Oh, we're in a holler. We're in a holler. We like it. Yeah. It's amazing. How'd you get there? I grew up just outside of there, a little town called Mars Hill. And I grew up two hours away in Wilkesboro, small town.

And you gravitated towards Asheville? How? Well, we actually lived in Boulder for about a decade. Really? Yeah, we were working,

she was working at Naropa University. I went to school there. Oh, that's that freaky hippie university, right? Buddhist inspired, we call it

the Buddhist inspired Harvard. They have a class in Zen flower arrangement. Ikebana. Ikebana. Ikebana, yeah. I didn't take that one. This is hilarious. You get an accredited class in Zen flower arrangement.

The only place that I know of. Yeah. Yeah. Which is also kind of similar. It's got a similar kind of vibe. Yeah. Boulder most certainly does. And another place that's tucked in the mountains.

It's like there's something about mountains that are so humbling. Yeah. Yeah, Boulder most certainly does. And another place that's tucked in the mountains. It's like there's something about mountains that are so humbling. Like you just look at it like you can't be that important. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Like 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 has created. and that's what the mountains are to me like snow covered tree covered whatever they are seeing a a lake at the bottom of a canyon and just like nature's stunning works of art and the the just the sheer vast magnitude of

them like the rockies forces people to sort of humility oh yeah sort of like beach towns yeah you know like why are beach towns so why is everybody so chill by the beach well look at that fucking ocean man who are you how are you taking yourself so seriously look at that thing it's fast you can't see the end and it's all water. And it's moving up and back. And at any point in time, it could just rise up in a thousand-mile-high swell and take out the entire planet. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

There's something about nature that's, like, super important. So people that live in a place where they don't get a chance to see it, you know. And New York City, in a sense, is humbling in its own way because as we said everything is natural you know 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 uh last time i was there i was staying at this uh hotel and we were pretty high up and uh you know you open up your, and you look out the window like, whoa, this is crazy. This is so futuristic and bizarre.

We're in the middle of it. Like, 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 and the various little cubicles and boxes around them. Absolutely. Yeah. But I think that, at least to me,

the most peaceful version of that, that kind of imagery is the natural version. The real natural version as far as non-man created, I should say, you know, the mountains. And there's something about it, like especially like a place like Asheville or a place like Boulder,

it's sort of like 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 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 uh in that like boy i have a responsibility now like people are enjoying this yes getting maybe hopefully getting some value from it yeah well

at the very least being entertained on a bus you on a plane or what have you, or you're stuck in a commute. At the very least, it's that. How often do you guys do it? We do a podcast once a week. So we do an interview like this or a conversation like this probably once a week. Now, when you do those, do you prepare for them? Do you have a theme or do you have like questions that you lay out beforehand and usually yeah usually it's with a with a person or group that you know we're exploring a particular topic like you know 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 you know know, various aspects of, 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, um, informed and in terms of their ignorance about what's going on at that interface and just kind of explore it and see what happens um and can you give me example of like one of the recent episodes we did that yeah sure so we recently uh i talked to um a neuroscientist named david vago who's at harvard and he's a contemplative neuroscientist um and jake davis who's a buddhist cognitive philosopher and we sort of explored um 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, you know, has a really, you know, 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, what actually is occurring in the nervous system, seeing if they can come up with a model to describe that neuroscientifically.

That's fascinating. fMRI is really interesting stuff. Oh, yeah. Have you ever been in one? It's so weird. No, no. It's like a shamanic drum beating through your head. Really?

It's really bizarre. 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? It's just a huge magnet. Yeah. I've been in an MRI before. Yeah.

Which is similar. You hear that. Dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong,

dong. This one had like the one we went to, like had, I mean, what sounded like drum beats and all kinds of weird stuff. Drum beats? Wow. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know if it was like that for you. No, that's what it sounded like. Yeah. Yeah. It was weird. 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. Ooh. Yeah. Ooh, exactly. 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. And that 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. 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'd be a lot of intensity and emotional connection to that. But these concepts, 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. Yeah, it's true. I mean, just recently in the contemplative neuroscience field, they discovered that when you're not doing anything that is like your baseline state, that you are, in fact, doing something. And 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 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 um but no actually a lot of stuff's happening it's like your self program is running basically yeah like what well we don't understand what the fuck is is that self program that's the problem how much of that

is just keeping the heart beating how much of that is maintaining a normal state without freaking out and ripping your clothes off running into traffic and what causes you to freak out and rip your clothes off and run into traffic and do you find that having these shows and doing all these podcasts has given you a, like a window that you would have normally not had before? Oh, totally. Totally.

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 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, 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, like the way it's going to interface with the most amount of people.

Yeah, I mean, sometimes I think it's one of the most grandiose things to do is to start a podcast or to be a media person, and I sometimes wonder about myself as a result. 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 really interesting to see how like his podcast and the stuff that he talks about and his own development is I don't know if you can relate to it has really come across in each episode as it's and now we have an archive of seven years of like development of you know

his own understanding and then how everything just kind of converges. Now we're really exploring the convergence. 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. It's like the interfacing with ideas, the ability to exchange information. It's all sort of radically changing right in front of us. And, you know know podcasting is just a part of that absolutely how um how do you feel like you're gonna take this thing into the future do you have any plans for it are you trying to expand it or you are you uh you're nodding virtual virtual reality's next i think like oculus oculus riff style podcasting well i mean part of

I think like Oculus Oculus riff style podcasting. Well, I mean part of it. Well, that could happen. We'll see if that's popular, but no, no, I think, you know, for us, you know, we're doing Buddhist geeks as a media project, but we're also, you know, meditation teachers and we work a lot with other folks and we've trained, you know, with, with various Buddhist teachers. So for us, we're wanting to make a space both for, you know 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. 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 the buddhist geeks dojo and what does that entail what's going to be in there it'll 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.

Why Buddhism, though? Like, why not? Why call it something? Is call it something is that work i mean you're talking about rebelling against buddhism right yeah well we've rebelled we've thought about this a lot and we've rebelled against our rebellion that's the phase we're currently in yeah i mean it's like if we don't call it buddhism we'll call it something else and then there's a framework around that you know so it's like i can't get outside of the framework no matter how or a framework no matter how hard i try and my training and has been with some really awesome people in the buddhist tradition and i'm not going to be able to just let that you know it's always going to impact me and influence me and there's something about the flavor of that tradition and what it reveals hippies and the hippies and it's changing and it's changing

and it's changing changing look i mean it's changing in what way you guys are changing it a little bit because of technology and you're interfacing with technology i mean yeah i mean we're just a small part of it i mean how else is it changing i mean science is coming in really influencing it the mindfulness movement is very much influence you could you could call mindfulness a form of secular buddhism um i mean certainly the guy that that had that's had the most impact on the mindfulness movement john cabot zen was spent you know 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.

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. And it's true in some cases, and in other cases it's like a lot of other religions. There's a lot of... What's the creepiest forms of Buddhism? There must be. Throw them under the bus. Creepiest forms? They'll feel good. What's the most dogmatic, the most ideology-filled?

I mean... There must be, right? I think... Bikram yoga? No. I mean, there are lots of forms that are very rigid, you know, 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 was really powerful and works, they get really fixated on it. Right, like wearing orange robes? Yeah, like wearing orange robes, although that's not really that popular anymore, at least in its current form in the West. Monasticism is definitely not taking off. So that's one way it's changing also. It's moved away from monasticism and toward this more kind of lay-centered life. Being integrated with everyone else.

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 just that's an intermediary insight from from you know from my experience what are the confining aspects of calling it buddhism though like what what is what are the pitfalls of that besides hippies you're definitely gonna get some problematic not that i love hippies don't get me wrong yeah same but hippies come in many shades there's's legit hippies, and then there's like really annoying hippies that just sort of, you know, they use the hippie framework to just be annoying. Sure. I mean, I'll say one confining thing is that Buddhism is a religion, I mean, at least in terms of how we understand religion. Is it tax-free? Is it tax-free?

Is it tax-free? Yeah. Do you have a tax-free exemption the same way that other religions do? We personally don't. We personally don't. You could do that, yeah. You'll get fucking chased down.

Don't do it. It gets real hairy when you don't want to pay taxes. They go, oh, really? Time to take a little closer look at the Buddhist geek organization. Yeah, see what you're doing on Saturday nights there. Infiltrate. Yeah, I think with anything like Buddhism, I mean, you inherit. But choosing that framework, we inherit it.

And so there's a lot about religions and spirituality in general that I don that i don't personally like you know like what so um i think that there is a there's a tendency to project i mean you brought in the word divinity so i'll use that like to project our divinity onto the teachers or onto some sort of system and um it can be disempowering for a lot of people. People can get trapped in beliefs that, you know, have been carried forward for, you know, years and centuries that aren't 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. 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. The mind training aspects of it. What do you think is the tangible benefits of this mind training aspect of it that you personally experienced? Personally, I can say personally, I feel much, much more, much more open and much more generous, compassionate. There's a lot more freedom. I can get stuck on the smaller sense of self meaning, you know, I have these thoughts of like 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. So it really is like a workaround for a lot of the biological pitfalls. I think so. I think it's a way of working with the situation as it is and, and making the most of it.

If someone came along with another name though, like Buddhist, like the word, the word Buddhist, if someone came along with another name for a similar practice, do you think that it would be accepted? I think they have. Yeah.

I think there's some, I think the Buddhist tradition, especially in the West has been modified, like mindfulness based stress reduction. I think the Buddhist tradition, especially in the West, has been modified, like mindfulness-based stress reduction. I mean, some of these different techniques are taken from the ancient techniques. There's something about grooves in consciousness and patterns, like we were talking about earlier. So by going under Buddhism, we're kind of riding in those grooves, and they're not all bad you know yeah no there's something i don't know my own experience and this it's a little embarrassing like in a secular context to talk about this because it it's weird to say you know for whatever reason i just fell in love with the the forms and the and the the ritual and the you know and the just the feel of 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. And 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 like it works for me. You know, 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. You know, 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 has, it's an interesting inclination. So, you know, just like we had the search for 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.

The deification of the teacher is a real issue though, right? That really does become an issue with any time any person is the distributor of knowledge or information. They take this position. Yes. Elevated. It's challenging 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 to be able to know freedom for themselves you know through their own practices of paying attention and being with things and in

that sense that the best teachers are the ones that make themselves irrelevant. The best teachers. The best teachers make themselves completely irrelevant, I think. The process can be empowering in itself. Yeah. Everyone's so calm. Everyone involved in the, did Buddhists ever get into like death metal or driving too fast or racing cars

I get into driving too fast there's a whole movement in the west the Dharma Punks the Dharma Punks who are based here in LA they were like basically a group of folks they're my friends yeah they're our friends

they have like major house parties with huge you know music bands and do they do drugs um that movement not really well i think a lot of them had done a lot of drugs and so part of the movement is actually about being able to be okay without the drugs and i think so that's part of the reason a lot of people are attracted to that movement. Boring. What about drinking? We drink. Yeah? I'll have a glass of wine. But a little bit or do you get hammered? I don't really. I don't get hammered. So if someone's at the bar and they pass you a shot. I just don't like it. You don't like the feeling? Yeah, it doesn't feel good. I feel like crap afterwards.

Definitely afterwards. It's not the afterwards part. Like how do you feel before? How do you feel during and how do you feel before? How do you feel during? And how do you feel afterwards? Like if I take the average of that, I don't feel very good. So I don't tend to. Yeah, that's. I personally don't tend to. Bukowski used to get upset at stoners.

Duncan and I were talking about this last night because they didn't have to pay for the experience. They didn't have the hangover. That Bukowski felt like you earned your drunk with the hangover that bukowski bukowski felt like you earned your drunk with the hangover you know he loved that i mean there's a there's a hangover for being stoned it's just a little more subtle really you feel like that yeah sure what do you feel like the hangover for being stoned is i don't feel it at all it's a it's a quality of of kind of a little bit of sludginess of the mind and of an increase in self-referencing talk for me, like of like more like subtle fear and anxiety and self-preoccupation. That's what I've noticed.

Well, that's fascinating. Like in what way? way in 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 like contraction that comes after expansion. So that's what I would describe. But it's like a mental contraction. It's not like the headaches and the... No, it's not as physical as alcohol.

Do you guys get in that North Carolina weed? That's what's going on. You got to get some California weed. Well, you remember we lived in Boulder, so... Indica and sativas, right? You remember we lived in Boulder, so we've tried all varieties. Yeah, I'm sure.

Maybe it's a physical thing, though. I don't experience that. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's the mental training that we've done and being a little more sensitive to that. I don't know. I don't know, but I don't get sludgy afterwards. There's no sludginess. Yeah, it could be personal differences. But that's also indica.

That which is a wide uh margin by a wide margin the majority of what most people are getting yeah it's easier to grow it's more more common and it's what a lot of people are looking for it's got more of that narcotic effect whereas the sativas have more of like an uplifting different sort of uh and then there's also the eating of it which is much more introspective that's right much more cycle much more psychedelic that's right yeah i mean so personally i don't have anything against uh 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 are we are we trying because the problem with so many substances you get into a pattern of of of really trying to cope with the difficulty of experience and then getting addicted to that state as a way of dealing and i think that's where the problem comes in from a kind of mind training and contemplative perspective it's like yeah that's a good way to describe it because that is what sort of happens right that's that's why people get drunk that's why people do pills yeah it's like this this existence is so confusing in itself that you just want to escape and then you escape and that escape becomes a trap yeah you get locked in again you have to keep escaping

and then if you stop then you got to deal with all this shit that comes up it doesn't feel good yeah and then you gotta go to rehab and try to wean your body off the escape and if you're a buddhist teacher you've got to be concerned about how everyone perceives you because you're not perfect because you're all pilled up that's right yeah you can't have a pilled up buddhist teacher is there any buddhist teachers that are all fucked up on adderall uh oh there there are as many as many Buddhist teachers doing as many weird things as there are any other humans I'm pretty sure but wouldn't you hope that at least overall there would be more improvement in their overall character or ability to cope with this existence I think there is overall I think people inclined towards openness and then there's a balance between you know the

multiple levels of development i don't know meaning that you know just because we develop in spiritual context then you also have you know your social context and um so we have to continue to develop evenly you know across the spectrum i think that's one of the trickiest paradoxes. You can become really good at being in this free, liberated, open, spacious mind. Some people are incredibly good at it, and you're just with them, and you have a hit of that. But their sex life is completely messed up, and they abuse small dogs and children.

Really? 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. You have been those folks? Oh, yeah. I've been dysfunctional and messed up and doing stupid stuff.

While you were practicing Buddhism? Sure. folks oh yeah i've been dysfunctional and you know messed up and doing stupid stuff while you're practicing buddhism sure what was the influence that caused you to be dysfunctional and fucked up while you're practicing usually my the insights that have come from buddhism i think that direction so the insights that have they've destabilized me really sure sort of like a psychedelic experience can make someone go crazy permanently or temporarily. Yeah, I think I've gone through periods. I'd say it's been less the Buddhist meditation as much as it's been like healing just parts of my past, you know, being a human and having been through difficult times, you know. I think more of it's probably been psychological and one of the common things that happens you know in a spiritual context is that people use their spiritual practice to bypass

those human psychological issues it's called spiritual bypassing um 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 like my human experience on a level that I hadn't wanted to before. And then it was really painful. 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 seeing the reality of what's really happening here, like how are we constructing this reality? And that starts to peel back. There so much, there's a lot of freedom. And then at the same time, it's like, oh, crap, like, I got to 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 interworlds 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, you got to wash the dishes, he's got to take out the trash. And then, you know, if you have kids, you got to raise the kids. And how do you do that without killing each other, you know? As 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 like the way that your mind inherently is. Yeah, that's similarly discussed in the psychedelic community.

Like, what's the point in having these experiences if you can't bring back the revelations and enhance your actual here and now life? Sure. It's really important. Yeah, it's really important. And then when it is integrated, like, I definitely want to flesh this out just a little bit more so people can get the sense of that. Yes, they're really, they're difficulties. And they're beautiful, vast, spacious moments. And then at the same time, and even if you don't have any beautiful, like 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 it there's a sense that when it's a wearing out that's how i describe it's a wearing out process of a smaller sense of who we are very, very, very beautiful people. You know, like 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. So in a sense, you guys are kind of Buddhist evangelists.

That's part of what you're doing like in in the podcast you sort of explaining or expressing what how it's enhanced your life this is one way it's yeah it's what it's one way to do it I mean we're not evangelists in the in this sort of like missionary sense I think we're evangelists in this in the sense that you know we think there's value here think we're evangelists in the sense that, you know, 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, you know,

it's useful to be able to connect with other folks who've done it and who in some sense can, you know, can be there with you. One of our mentors said, you know, the role of a teacher is to be just a little less afraid than the student. Doesn't mean they're like, 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, like if you're into psychedelics, we've, we've explored psychedelics,

you know, it's useful to go work with people who know a bit about it and who can like, um, not freak out if you have a bad trip or if you start losing your, your mind, you know, that can like extend their stability to you so that you can actually go through that process and learn from it.

And in the end, like have an empowering experience of it or at least an empowering like interpretation of what happened um instead of just feeling like oh my god my reality sucks and like i'm just going to be depressed and you know kind of crawl into a hole um so i think you know in the same way you know for us we just want to create a space where people can um you know practice together like like they've been doing for thousands of years, sitting and exploring their minds in a collective. Well, I think you two are the calmest people I've ever had in the podcast. This has been like the calmest podcast ever.

And I think in that sense, you guys are excellent representations of the Buddhist lifestyle. That's what it's all about, right? Being at peace. Sometimes. Being chilled. Sometimes. Unless you're a Dharma punk.

Unless, unless you're driving up the four or five, five o'clock. Yeah. That'll do it to you. That'll definitely do it to you. Um, thank you guys very much.

It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, thank you. It's been entertaining, uh, three hours. And, uh,

if anybody wants to get a hold of your podcast, your Twitter handle is Buddhist Geeks. Emily Horn and Vincent Horn, those are your two individual Twitter handles. And your website? BuddhistGeeks.com. And the podcast is Buddhist Geeks. And available on iTunes, all that jazz.

Are you guys on Stitcher? Yes. Yes. Excellent. And can you just, do you have a video aspect of it or just audio only? We do a conference every year. And so we've recorded all of the presentations at the conference and do release those eventually as videos. And those on BuddhistGeeks.com? Yeah. Okay. Terrific. Well, thank you guys. Thank you very much. It's been a lot of fun. Very interesting. Thank you. Thanks to our sponsor. Well, thank you guys. Thank you very much. It's been a lot of fun. Very interesting. Thank you.

Thanks to our sponsor. Thanks to LegalZoom.com. Go to LegalZoom.com and use the code word RO slash rogan blueapron.com forward slash rogan and get your first two meals for free we'll be back tomorrow with stand-up comedian nick yusuf and uh lots more podcasts this week so uh take care and bye byebye for now. Big kiss.