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August 6 - September 3, 2017
shutting off the self to accelerate learning has become a strategic imperative.
Ritalin and Adderall, and mood-shifting painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin.
a world where 67 percent of us admit to checking our status updates in the middle of the night, during sex, and before attending to basic biological needs like going to the bathroom, sleeping, or eating breakfast, we think it’s safe to assume that a good part of what we’re habitually doing online is more to forget ourselves for a moment than inform ourselves for the long haul.
Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness, and Richness, or STER for short.
These days, we’re drowning in information, but starving for motivation. Despite a chirpy self-improvement market peppering us with endless tips and tricks on how to live better, healthier, wealthier lives, we’re struggling to put these techniques into action.
The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, “the forgetting of the forgetting.”
“The ability to face constructively the tension37 of opposing ideas,” Martin writes in his book The Opposable Mind, “. . . is the only way to address this kind of complexity.”
The experiment was widely hailed as proof that psychedelic drugs can generate life-enhancing mystical experiences.”
On the list of toxic substances, drugs like heroin, crack, and methamphetamine rank high. No question about it, they’re really bad for you and really bad for those around you. But, while heroin is so destructive it claims the number-two slot, it still couldn’t beat out the number-one scourge: alcohol.
“in all probability . . . hocus pocus is nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus (“this is the body”), [a] ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church.”
founder Michael Murphy, whose family had owned that idyllic stretch of California coastline for generations, the path that led to Eckhart on Oprah was largely laid by Dick Price,10 Esalen’s cofounder and first director.
For the past five years, the French research group Sexualitics20 has been building the “Porngram,” an analytic tool to track online sexual behaviors
Franciscan nuns and Tibetan Buddhists. During moments of intense prayer, the nuns report unio mystica, or oneness with God’s love. Peak meditation, meanwhile, brings the Buddhists into “absolute unitary being” or, as they say, “oneness with the universe.”
“During ecstatic prayer or meditation, energy normally used for drawing the boundary of self gets reallocated for attention. When this happens, we can no longer distinguish self from other. At that moment, as far as the brain can tell, you are one with everything.”
“When all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Erowid,
“Digital projection mapping has created unparalleled possibilities,”
Could we take a page out of Alan Metni’s iFly book and re-create the embodiment, and consequences that the world’s best flow hackers relied on, to give regular folks a taste of the state? By combining Tony Andrew’s sound design, Android Jones’ digital imagery and Mikey Siegel’s brain tech, could we construct a novel and interactive environment?
Sitting in an enclosed dome, he and his wife put on small backpack subwoofers (so they literally felt the bass through their bodies, not their ears). They then watched two digital flowers blossom and contract on the screen surrounding them. But there was a trick to the setup—Larry was feeling his wife’s heart beat and watching his flower pulse to her heart’s rhythms, and she was watching and feeling his. By deliberately crossing the feedback loops, the installation creates technologically mediated empathy, no talking required.
“I’m dismantling the Death Star,”20 he told a war reporter, “to build Solar Ovens for Ewoks.”
“We find the right mix of really interesting people and subject them to powerful state-changing experiences that accelerate social bonding. It’s the same formula used at Burning Man and at Summit.”
Tal Ben Shahar’s42 course on happiness is the most popular in the university’s history,
Vi Cit Tecum—“May the Force Be with You.”
Orwell feared that our fears will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
And for anyone interested, there’s a free downloadable Hedonic Calendaring PDF at www.stealingfirebook.com/downloads/
Also see Arne Dietrich’s excellent TED talk, “Surfing the Stream of Consciousness,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syfalikXBLA.
