Numinous Nonsense

The Transformation Try-Out is inspired by the notion of the 30-day trial, which Steve Pavlina made so popular. The basic idea is to take a new action, or habit that you want to establish and commit to doing it daily for 30 days (much like a software trial). At the end of the 30 days you can choose to quit, continue, or modify your commitment. Knowing that you can change things after 30 days, the time you spend engaging in the new pattern becomes much easier. Also, you have a chance to get a feel for the results of changing the habit, to see if it’s something worth pursuing.

The transformation try-out however is a slightly different concept, that Duff McDuffee, Ryan Oelke, and myself came up with. It’s different in that we want to constantly evolve the try-out process itself, and because we’ve added these key distinctions and suggestions when performing the 30 day try-out:

1. Keep in mind that changing a habit is often very hard work, and while the benefits are often enormous, doing so can often be massively destabilizing. Often times if you push the edge too far in transformational work, you can end up with a break down of multiple systems, instead of the breakthrough you are looking for. Because human beings are a system of many different tendencies, belief systems, habits, and so on, one major shift to an element of the system can have unforeseen impact on the system-at-large.
2. Know which habit to try and change, at what time, and in what order. Perhaps in order to make other bigger changes you need to start with the simplest one’s of all. For example, say you want to start your own business, but you are in extremely poor health and barely have the energy to maintain your current lifestyle. The 1st thing you may want to change is your energy levels, and to do something related to your health, so that you can have the energy to commit to other larger changes and goals.
3. Clear parameters and the appropriate tracking are invaluable. In order to follow through with a transformation try-out you first have to be very clear about the parameters of the change, and then need to have a reliable way to track your progress. It could be as easy as creating a small calendar on an index card and checking off each day that you perform the new action you are trying to do (or avoid a harmful action). Or it might be more elaborate, require more detailed metrics, happen over a digital medium, or have a collaborative component.
4. While you are participating in a transformation try-out it is also a good idea to keep some sort of record of the process. Keeping a journal with observations about the process, or blogging if you’d like, can help with sticking to it and also learning from the process.
5. Tell people what you are doing, and find others who can understand and support your decision. The more you talk about it, thinking about it, and reference it the easier the try-out will be.

Keep your eyes peeled for transformation try-outs from me and my friends, as we share our successes and failures, and hopefully the larger lessons that we learn along the way. We’ll be posting many of these in a blog format, and hopefully will continue to evolve the “transformation try-out” process itself.

I saw that John Daido Loori, Roshi was going to be teaching a weekend retreat at Naropa, a few months back. I’m always on the lookout for interesting Buddhist teachers who are coming through town, so that we can invite them to be on Buddhist Geeks. Fortunately Daido Roshi & his organization were amendable to that, and we recently had him come by our studio for a conversation on meditation and the arts.

Joining us was Robert Spellman, a meditation instructor (and art teacher) I met at Naropa while I was in school there. Robert suggested that he actually conduct the interview, and I was really glad that he did. He asked some fantastic questions, that only someone with a deep background in both meditation and artistic practice could, and the resultant dialogue with Daido Roshi was extremely engaging and interesting.

For your listening enjoyment, here is the 1st part of their conversation, which just aired on Buddhist Geeks today. It is entitled, Zen Mountain Monastery: Zen and the Arts.

I had an interesting dream a few nights ago, where I was attending a meditation retreat in the Shambhala tradition. The retreat was in some sort of large house with a lot of other folks (mostly younger). There were several rooms, including a large meditation hall, which ironically no one was using. Everyone was talking, socializing, and doing anything other than what one would expect on a meditation retreat: meditating. Eventually I went and sat in the meditation hall (by myself) and noticed that there were two men standing guard of a door connecting to the hall. I somehow knew that they were guarding the teacher interview room, and that I would eventually have an interview. So I sat meditating, waiting.

Suddenly I was in the room, sitting in front of a large jukebox looking radio set, which was connected to three teachers who were out to sea (don’t ask me…). So the teachers asked me if I had any questions for them, and I sat struggling trying to figure out what to ask. Everything that came to mind seemed irrelevant, and like all thoughts, was spontaneously released. As I sat there struggling to figure out a question to ask, and seeing that any possible question was irrelevant, several other students crowded behind me and started asking, what seemed at the time like, trivial questions. Their voices were whiny and their demeanors somewhat complacent. Still trying to see if there was any useful questions I could ask, and as the dream began to fade, I realized that I had no questions.

On Going Nowhere

Upon waking (no pun intended) I realized that indeed I don’t have any questions about the spiritual path. It all seems so radically obvious—though not in some way that makes me feel special for seeing it—that every moment of seeking, of wanting to know, of trying to find some final answer, is all the same. And it leads nowhere. Of course, it’s taken quite some time to come to this, and so I wouldn’t say it’s been here all the time, though the position of “non-seeking” of having no more questions, of having surrendered to reality, seems to be a very simple position to come to and inevitable when looking at how things have unfolded. I’m not claiming it is done though, just that at this point, there aren’t any questions.

That being said, if I were trying to learn certain meditative states (like the levels of shamatha that Alan Wallace teaches) I would definitely need to ask questions. So, I’m not saying that with all kinds of meditation practices I would have no questions, just that in the realm of “insight practice” it seems crystal clear what the practice is, and that the practice is doing itself.

Pomp & Circumstance

Another thing that I was left reflecting on, after the dream, was how much pomp and circumstance there seemed to be in the retreat center I was hanging out in. The gaurds who watched the door, the whiny students, and the far-removed teachers all seemed to contribute to an overall ethos of the spiritual path being something that is distant, only realized by a few, and something to be coveted rather than realized. Certainly I’ve seen some of this attitude and I think a big part of that comes from having poor models of awakening. The various models of enlightenment, that my friend and teacher Daniel Ingram talks about apply big time, and the more accurate, down-to-earth models people have the more empowered they are about practice, and the more humble and pragmatic they seem to be.

And actually, a synonym for “down-to-earth” is “matter-of-fact” and one of the things I appreciate most about having a model of enlightenment that only tries to understand enlightenment as the dissolution of the center-point and the end of falsely imputing duality in this conflux of causes and conditions, is that I can speak with a growing sense of confidence and matter-of-factness about what I’ve come to find out in this regard. I don’t have to pretend that I’m perfect in any way, that I’m a more loving person, have quit experiencing difficult emotions like fear and anger, or that the growing understanding of non-duality does anything particularly special to Vince and his human experience. Of course, I will have to deal with other people’s perceptions, but that’s ok, because their perceptions and misperceptions are all that is keeping them from realizing what I’ve come to know. And I’m willing to take the hits, and help spread a little more realism in a world where we all want to do away with one-half of our human experience. Me included.

I wrote about Bit Literacy a while back, which a phenomenal productivity system developed by Mark Hurst. His system is especially aimed at how we work with information (or ‘bits’) and how having a clear understanding of how to work with information (what he calls ‘bit literacy’) impacts your effectiveness as a knowledge worker. And since there are so many knowledge workers out there, his suggestions are extremely high leverage. Check out this interview that we did with him (I came on as a guest and chimed in once I think) where he describes some of the powerful tools from bit literacy. Master Information Overload Now and Forever with Bit Literacy:

And check out the sweet new embed player that we just developed for Falling Fruit! You can now embed any of our episodes on your site/blog.

This is a great video, from the Google Talk series, with Philippe Goldin. Philippe is a research scientist and heads the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience group in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. He spent 6 years in India and Nepal studying various languages, Buddhist philosophy and debate at Namgyal Monastery and the Dialectic Monastic Institute…

I found this video on the IEET Cyborg Buddha Project, which is run by James Hughes, Mike LaTorra, and George Dvorsky. This is an awesome site, with some fantastic folks who are running it. Here is a little info about the project in case you’re interested:

The three of us are launching the IEET Cyborg Buddha Project to combine our efforts and promote discussion of the impact that neuroscience and emerging neurotechnologies will have on happiness, spirituality, cognitive liberty, moral behavior and the exploration of meditational and ecstatic states of mind.

I’m drooling…

In the first post of this series I defined death more broadly than the common understanding of biological death, to mean the ending of things. And in the second post I showed how this understanding of death leads to living more fully, and can if explored adequately can actually lead to a transformation of our very identities and to a kind of “spiritual immortality.” This immortality has everything to do with seeing that “I” am not this fleeting body, this fleeting mind, etc. but instead include all of that and more.

When speaking of death and immortality though, it’s important to bring in the perspective of a school of thought called the Transhumanists. These thinkers believe that information technologies are growing exponentially and that this exponential growth will transform nearly every aspect of our lives, including our ability to extend life indefinitely, which is also known as radical life extension. I happen to agree with them, and am a big fan of these theories. One of my favorite Transhumanists, Ray Kurzweil, explains radical life extension this way:

One analogy that life extension researcher Aubrey de Grey uses is, “How long does a house last? If you take care of the house diligently, and quickly address any problem that comes up, the house can last indefinitely. If you don’t take care of it, it won’t last very long.” The reason that analogy fails in regard to our own bodies is that we don’t yet understand all the methods and we don’t have all the maintenance tools for our bodies like we do for houses. We fully understand how a house works, because we engineered the concept of a house. We don’t yet have all that information about our bodies and brains, and we don’t have all the tools. But we will have them within twenty to twenty-five years, so we will be able to indefinitely maintain our bodies—and even anticipate, before they occur, the kinds of issues that now cause us to age and die. We’re talking about putting your life into your own hands rather than leaving it in the metaphorical hands of fate.

Now there’s a whole lot more to their argument, which I won’t go into here¹, but what I will say is that much of their vision is quite compelling. What I do want to explore is how the Transhumanist vision of life extension—or what basically amounts to biological immortality—can be understood in terms of my broader definition of death, and how it relates to the “spiritual immortality” that was discussed earlier. Are they the same thing, completely opposite, or something altogether? But first let’s see what Mr. Kurzweil thinks about death.

Up until now, we’ve had no opportunity to circumvent our mortality. So we had no alternative but to rationalize this tragedy—which is what death is—saying, “Oh, it’s really a good thing. And it’s ennobling; it gives life meaning.” A large part of religion is to rationalize this tragic loss of knowledge and skill and personality as something positive. But really, what’s positive about human beings is our pursuit of new frontiers.

So basically he sees death, specifically the death of a biological entity, as a tragedy. But is radical life extension really going to forgo the death of our biological being indefinitely? Not really. Firstly, accidents can still happen and with each leap in technological maturity comes an even greater possibility that we kill ourselves. The very same technologies that will give us the abilities to live longer will also give us an unprecedented ability to wipe out the entire biosphere². Secondly, people may still choose to stop living. There is no guarantee, just as there never has been, that just because people can live that they will. And thirdly, our physical longevity may increase, but that doesn’t mean that death won’t happen eventually. We will still be limited by whatever physical constraints exist (ex. the end of the universe). Granted that could be a long time out, there will always continue to be limitations on conditioned systems.

Putting that aside for a moment though, and not just engaging his argument at the level it was constructed, I think it’s valuable to look at his claims in light of the broader definition of death. If death is equated with change and with the ending of any particular constellation or pattern, then in Kurzweil’s world there will actually be more death and not less! The radical transformations he discusses would mean the death of so many things that are familiar to us. He envisions biological and non-biological (i.e. technological creations) intelligence merging, such that what we now see our our bodies and minds would become radically different (think cyborgs but way different than Robocop). Also, with the exponential change of technology each year will bring about more and more change (indeed change is doubling!). There is nothing about Kurzweil’s vision that will allow us to avoid death. We may be able to prolong some sort of pattern of identity over a longer period of time, but that pattern will be so radically altered in the process that it would be fair to say that we will have to die many times over before it’s all done with.

Different Kinds of Immortality

Another thing I’d like to mention is that many of the Transhumanists aren’t themselves familiar with the “spiritual immortality” that is discussed in many of the world’s spiritual traditions. This statement from Kurzweil evidences that:

Religion talks about transcending death, but it has a mystical answer to how that happens. In fact, we find this transcendence in the real physical world. We find it in technology. If you put materials and energy in the right configurations, magical things happen. You get powers that go beyond the original materials. That’s what excites me about being an inventor.

And we will transcend death and that natural cycle. We’re not just grapes on the vine—we are overcoming that natural process that we emerged from. Yes, we came from nature, but we are going to surpass it through the power of our technology, which comes from our mind made manifest in the real world.

Two things pop out immediately when reading his statement. One is that he thinks mystical experience is limited to some sort of magical power, of “powers that go beyond their original materials.” The other is that he definitely conceives of our ultimate identities as being inextricably tied to our physical bodies and minds. The mystics understanding doesn’t have anything to do with magical powers as much as it does with untangling the sense of identity from any thing which can change, until identity finally includes everything! Unfortunately, Kurzweil just isn’t qualified to make these kind of claims.

And if he could, if he had awakened to an identity that went beyond the body and mind, would he still be chasing physical immortality with so much passion? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with extending the human lifespan. Indeed a lot of suffering can be alleviated by doing so, and in many ways we have a moral obligation to ease the suffering of all beings. The real problem has to do with extending it in hopes that we can somehow achieve spiritual immortality, which is actually our birthright. This immortality has nothing to do with the conditions of the world, including those that could extend our physical life spans, but instead has everything to do with knowing directly that life and death are all natural parts of the conditioned world. Knowing this, we can live and die with grace, no matter how long that is. Knowing this we are free.

1. Check out The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology if you’re interested in learning more. [↩]
2. Kurzweil himself claims that self-replicating nanotechnology, if it were spread across the globe, and was unhampered, could destroy the entire biosphere in 90 minutes! [↩]