title: zmt date: 2019-11-22 draft: true
tags:
- fiction
Summary : Optimistic short sci fi
World peace has been achieved. In 2050, world leaders engaged in a mutual spiritual summit where they each took several doses of a newly discovered compound ‘ZMT’. A close derivative of the molecule DMT. Their individual ego’s were seen through. A unity like no other was established. A collective consciousness with the single goal of unification. The virtuality of the world was seen through. Emptiness, suchness, void. These terms suddenly became tangible and real. Thus world leaders were suddenly driven to action.
The most obvious problems were listed. Global nuclear war. Climate change. Artificial intelligence and biotechnological races. These problems were previously overlooked as there was no local solution to them. These were problems that could only be solved at a global level. Thus the engine of change was put into motion.
All countries simultaneously signed the global nuclear dearmanation treaty. All nuclear weapons were made obsolete. Top level physicists shared the same molecular enlightenment and refused to build any further weapons thus making them impossible to manufacture. Any manufacturing plants were shut down. Global nuclear war became an impossibility.
In terms of climate change, world leaders realised that they had to act fast. The delays of the previous generations had to be addressed. This required drastic solutions. Top level scientists were overclocked with new biological compounds to rapidly increase the rate of scientific discoveries. Funding that was previously designated for war and production of weapons was suddenly diverted to science and education. In a mere span of 7 years, new breakthroughs in nuclear fusion and waste disposal meant that we had an access to an abundance of energy. Energy production from coal and gas were switched with the economic incentives shifting to the use of nuclear fusion. Excess energy was distributed globally to developing nations as leaders realised they were all on the same sinking boat. India and China, previously the largest environmental polluters, switched to being the most environmentally conscious. The money diverted into education meant that the best teachers were economically incentivised to teach. Teaching became one of the top professions with the worlds best teachers offering online courses to the millions connected via the internet. The next generation of children were being educated at levels previously unimaginable. Education became less about credentialing and socialisation, and more about learning. Children became driven by curiosity. About solving problems rather than signalling intelligence and knowledge. Children could learn what they wanted to learn. A new generation of scientists were born tackling issues such as the creation of a benevolent artificial intelligence and ethical use of biotechnology.
Previously menial jobs such as driving and repetitive tasks were automated by specific AI’s. Fortunately the global cooperation meant that a true universal basic income was established. Universal in the sense that it was global. Every citizen received a stipend that allowed for comfortable living in the area that they were in. This was established through a new global cryptocurrency. The ubiquity of technology meant that all 7 billion of the worlds citizens were connected to the internet. Cheap portable tablets were airdropped onto developing countries. Education suddenly became abundant and free. The citizens of the developing countries often became the worlds best scientists and problems solvers as survival was a necessity for them. Better ways of water filtration and food production were developed. The global inequity and inequality gap was eliminated in only 20 years.
In 2070, scientists had a breakthrough in the field of artificial general intelligence. An AGI was created that could iteratively improve itself until it became Godlike. Fortunately the previous decades had solved the alignment problem. This AI worked solely towards the good of humanity. White collar intellectual jobs were made redundant. Instead a new economy of caring emerged. Caring for others whether it be a child, parent, patient, someone in your community became rewarded. It became a respectable profession. Doctors could now focus on meaningful face to face interaction instead of being bound in bureaucracy. Those who were previously useless in the eyes of the economy could now take meaningful roles in the community. The epidemic of meaningless seen in the early 21st century was diminishing. With more time abundance, people spent more time developing relationships and fostering a sense of community and purpose. Deep human needs which were largely ignored by masses of the human race, became a priority. Money and economic incentives no longer dictated meaning. The edifice of consumerism came tumbling down and out of that sprung the seeds of purpose, contentment and peace. Children were taught relevant information in schools. How to be happy. How to keep a fit body, a calm mind. Meditation and methods of attentional training became common. A major part of the curriculum became about self understanding. Understanding the human race through biology, sociology, history, physics, chemistry and introspection. Philosophical traditions bloomed in this period with a new found mental stability common to all human denizens. People spent less time ruled by their evolutionary biological mechanisms and instead devoted time to overcoming biases and improving character. As a consequence, healthcare burdens were significantly reduced. Problems such as obesity which had previously not been seen as psychological disruptions in a maladaptive environment were altogether solved. People simply could not be obese. The environment didn’t allow for it.
Cities were re-engineered to focus on optimising human flourishing. Previously they had paradoxically been one of the loneliest places with no shared social spaces. People would drift through like passengers on a ghost train. Now engineers and architects developed ‘third spaces’. Areas where people could congregate and perform social activities. More people could engage in this due to the time abundance. As a result, relationships between humans flourished. It became hard to become lonely.
Of course people still worked. But the focus became more on following your genuine intellectual curiosity rather than economic incentives. Thus children with a particular inclination towards the arts/sciences/management could become masters of their craft. The quality of all professionals far exceeded those seen in any previous human generation. Those previously from poor socioeconomic backgrounds had fewer limitations now with the access to free educational courses online. A more egalitarian meritocracy emerged. True equality of opportunity. People no longer felt work to be work. It became play.
Human began to understand themselves and the universe around them better. Neuroscience research showed concepts such as free will and ‘self’ to be illusory. Questions of ‘what is mind’, ‘what is consciousness’ became serious rigorous quests. A basic appreciation of the fact that humans are animals became the norm. We understand so little. We are small. And in that realisation a part of the universe observing itself suddenly began to understand.
title: why meditate? date: 2020-03-21
TLDR : Meditation is a tool to observe the mind
“If you wish to understand your mind, sit down and observe it” - Joseph Goldstein
I consider learning the skill of meditation to be the most important thing I’ve ever learnt in my life. By far.
It is hard to discuss, because it is experiential. Not a belief system, but a methodology for exploring your internal state.
When people ask me about meditation, they tend to have a preconcieved notion of what it is. That it involves some supernatural or irrational belief structure. That is involves growing out your hair, crossing your legs and ‘accessing your 9th Chakra’. “What do you even do. Are you sitting there just not thinking? “. Are you chanting Om in an attempt to gain some sort of ‘enlightenment’. Worst one was a Christian girl who said, ‘Uh, I don’t want to join a cult”.
This isn’t helped by the new surge in the ‘self help meditation’ movement. The word has lost its meaning. Being used by the next guru to influence others, or sell copies of their book. ’To think positive thoughts’.
It is a 1st person science
First of all. I just want to say, I am through and through, a scientist. I am one of the biggest skeptics of dogma and any claims that are unsupported. I caused a lot of trouble in my philosophy and ethics class, questioning from first principles. You can dismantle most dogma by asking ‘why’. My inherent disposition is one of doubt
And in my initial dive into Buddhist/Eastern philosophy, the first sentence I read was :
“Don’t blindly believe what I say. Don’t believe me because others convince you of my words. Don’t believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts. Don’t rely on logic alone, nor speculation.” - Buddha
That piqued my interest. And down the rabbit hole I went.
Meditation is a practice
The first thing is : meditation is a practice. It is like lifting weights or exercising in the gym. There is no authority. It is a simple set of exercises you do with your mind. It is radically scientific. Based on an epistemological stance of questioning entirely from first principles. Obviously there is religious muddying, where a lot of Eastern ‘Buddhists’ don’t even meditate. There are always attempts to institutionalise and solidify power.
But the practice itself is independent of any dogma. You don’t need to be a Buddhist or a Christian or a Hindu. Meditation is not ‘Buddhist’ insofar as the Laws of physics are not ‘Christian’ (even though discovered by Christians) or Algebra is not Islamic (even thought discovered by Muslims).
It is a set of mental exercises that produce lasting changes in the brain.
One of the initial instructions is so basic, that is is laughable. “ Just sit and pay attention to your own breath”
So you sit down and you try to pay attention. Ok. Its going well. 5 seconds in. Wow, I am really doing it. This is great, I wonder what Jess would think of this, I think she would flip out. I don’t really like her to be honest, I wonder if she likes me. What did I have for lunch today. Salmon. Salman Rushdie is such a great author…
And you are lost. Without training, this is how one spends their entire life. Without even realising it.
I remember I couldn’t even focus on the breath for 2 seconds. The worst part was realising that I had thought I was paying attention to my thoughts, that I ‘understood’ myself, and absolutely destroying that belief. I really did not understand my mind in the slightest.
You are trapped in a spell. This is the normal mind before any training in meditation. You don’t realise it, but for your whole life you have been lost in thought, without knowing necessarily that you are thinking.
The problem is most of our ‘default patterns of thought’ skew in a negative light. Wandering minds are unhappy minds- as a famous Neuroscience paper put it. Being scattered is not a pleasant feeling. Being focused is pleasant.
There are states of conscious experience that are available that are radically free of suffering. Full of intense joy, equanimity and free of aversion.
If you can’t focus on your breath for 5 seconds, how can you focus on something infinitely more complex, such as grief or sadness or boredom? There is something to discover here.
There are states you can get into that are radically different from normal perception.
Types of Meditation
Meditation is an incredibly broad term. It is like saying ‘Exercise’. It can encompass Gymnastics training to Olympic weightlifting to simply walking in the park.
There are many different techniques. However one that has gained some degree of popularity is the 2500 year old ‘Mindfulness’ meditation in the Buddhist Theravadan tradition. : Vipassana-Samatha meditation. But there are many more : in the Zen (soto) tradition. Tibetan Dgzochen practice. They all ultimately target the same root.
Mindfulness is a quality of mind that allows you to pay attention to whatever arises without being lost in the thought. It is a radically different way of relating to experience.
Instead of being lost in thought about an event, you can relate to it differently. Suppose you replay an embarrassing moment. That triggers feelings of guilt/sadness or the whole panoply of emotions available. That story then leads to another story ‘I am boring, or I am stupid’. Any sort of belief structure. That habit or pattern of thought repeated, cements itself. People can literally be angry for hours or days. People can stay angry and resentful for years against someone who has wronged them, even when it is not useful.
You are lost in a story that you are overlaying onto sensation.
What this training does, at a basic level, is it grants mental autonomy to ‘drop’ the pattern immediately. To see the thought, to observe the mind, without being lost in the stories. To see sadness or grief or joy for what it is. As sensations in the body. Or internal dialogue or imagery.
“You can drop whatever pattern you are lost in”. Instantly.
An analogy I like is this. Suppose you are waiting at the train station. A thought arises. This is like the train pulling up at the station. The default response that 99.9% of humanity experiences is that they get on the train, and are whisked away by the thought. Taken in all sorts of directions, onto new trains”. All at the mercy of the next arising thought in consciousness.
There is another option.
What this training does is. : allows you to see the train coming. And then choose not to get on.
Not always. It is difficult. But suddenly having that mental autonomy, you have a radically different way of relating to experience. One with much less misery and suffering. And much more peace and contentment.
The brains of meditators are objectively different
There is objective scientific evidence that there are structural changes in the brain of long term meditators. For example : Studies looking at monks with lifetime hours of 40,000+ show that there are changes in the pattern of brain waves with more alpha waves present.
The activity in a set of structures called the ‘Default mode network’ is different. The DFMN is responsible for discursive thought that arises when you are ‘doing nothing’. It is the backdrop of your conscious experience. The DFMN is quieter in long term meditators. It doesn’t light up as much as in non-meditators
I don’t intend to make this blog post a deep dive into the literature. But there is an excellent book called ‘The Science of Meditation’ that explores some of the studies done.
Internally direct attention
Basic training involves the ability to direct attention to some level. It gives you the tool to explore your internal world. How do thoughts arise? What is a thought? Where is it?
Through this exploration, you can come to realise the causes of ‘misery, unsatisfactoriness, discontent’. Whatever you want to call it.
At the root level, what this training allows one to do, is to experience real contentment. Not waiting for any external factor to change. But to experience contentment independent of any conditions.
As a default state, humans have evolved to be ‘discontented’. We want better things. We want to push away negative experience. We want to cling to positive experience. Evolutionarily this makes sense.
But both negative and positive experience are fleeting. Any negative experience will fade. Any positive experience will fade. Experience is ephemeral. Here one moment and gone the next. Any attempt to cling or hold on, is painful.
We go through life constantly chasing desires and pushing away negative experiences. This creates a level of ‘misery’, unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Use whatever terminology. But there is an angst. You can experience this by going on a retreat paradoxically. Just try and sit with your untrained mind for 30 minutes. Literally doing nothing. It won’t be pleasant I can promise.
Part of what this training does, is to allow you to understand desire and aversion. And then choose a middle way.
It’s like everyone is on a beach. When the tide comes in, they are running away. When the tide subsides, they are running towards it. Perpetually lost in a cycle of pushing, and pulling at experience. Wanting and not wanting.
But there is a middle way. To simply lie down on the sand and let the tide wash over you, finding joy in the experience.
Deeper Realisations : Illusory nature of the self, Impermanence, Suffering
I think the core of what these traditions point towards is the selfless nature of experience. More accurately, the self as we think of it, is not what it seems.
If you’ve had any training in neuroscience. This is obvious to you, at least from an intellectual standpoint. We are hallucinating our reality. The brain is a virtual reality headset constructing reality using data from our sense organs. And with that, there really no ‘unchanging self’.
There is no soul. No unchanging self. No constant unchanging entity you call ‘You’. There is a constant flux of change. Your cells are constantly dividing. There is no ‘place in the brain’ that houses the self. The brain can instead be seen as a boardroom with various subminds vying for conscious experience. You are literally not the same person as you were once you finish reading this sentence.
Furthermore from physics, we know that we are not ‘independent’. We are deeply interconnected. Where is the ‘self’ in the collection of atoms that compose you. Are you your body? Are you the brain? ‘You’ really are nowhere to be found.
But of course, you feel like a self at the moment. There is a narrative structure to your experience. You went to school in Bedford. You like Greek style yogurt. You look like ‘this’. But if you look closely, can see a narrative arising and passing away. You can dissolve the feeling that ‘you are behind your head’.
We actually lose our sense of self a lot I think. Imagine those moments in life, where you were truly immersed in the experience. Probably some of the most joyous experiences in your life. There was no projection of self referential thought. ‘You’ forgot you existed. There was just total immersion.
The fact is, you can see this inherent lack of self, lack of centre, as easily as you can see your blindspot. It’s not a matter of ‘progressing’ or ‘becoming a better meditator’. There is no ‘enlightenment’ where all your psychological problems dissolve and you permanently become a superior being. That is nonsense.
But you can see the inherent lack of self. And in that, there is a tremendous unity. It’s hard to describe. People can experience this when they take psychedelics. It’s like, there is really no centre to experience. There is just the arising and passing away of phenomena. And where you are, there is just the universe. An intense feeling of interconnectedness.
Please don’t take this as the truth. But as an avenue to explore yourself. Some Zen teachers famously were quite ‘violent’ in their objection to theorising, encouraging instead to simply sit and explore.
It is a hypothesis you can test. There are a set of techniques that allow you to explore your internal experience, and see this for yourself. It is not mystical, it is not magical. But it is strange and profound.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it is about understanding your mind.
This is what I think ‘Spirituality’ is. Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher - articulates this well in his essay : ‘Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty’.
Science is an exploration of the external world coming coming from a place of questioning. The telescope is an instrument we can use to discern this external reality.
Spirituality is an exploration of the internal subjective world coming from a place of questioning. Meditation is a tool we can use to greater discern this internal reality. It sharpens the faculty of attention.
There is much more to be said on this topic.
Starting Points :
title: impatience date: 2022-02-26
lost - forever chasing the ghost of optimal
What is the ‘most optimal’ training program? It is hard to know. But you can end up spinning your wheels by hopping from one program to another- constantly seeking the ‘best’.
Therefore you end up making no progress towards any specific goal.
It is better to stick with a program. Reap the benefits and move on. Why is this difficult?
Because we want results yesterday. We are inpatient. We want to be jacked, strong and flexible, holding front/back levers with full Planche.
The reality is : if you are in this for the long haul (i.e. decades)- it will take time. It is better to build a strong foundation to prevent injuries and in the longer run, make faster progress.
TLDR
- Stick to programs
- When your goals change- (hypertrophy/strength/achieving specific skills - then change the training program.
- Zoom out - think years/decades rather than weeks
- Injury prevention should be 1# priority for a non-professional (arguably also for a pro)