 Nice, we are live, round two with Dr. J. Sanguinetti. Thanks for coming on over. So good to see you again. Yeah. Yeah, you too. And so much has transpired for us both since we first talked. So, I'm really looking forward to this conversation and how it unfolds. Me too, been looking towards this for a while. So very good to see you. A lot has happened since 2019. It's so interesting how much the synthesis of science and spirituality is becoming more mainstreamed. Yep, I think the pandemic has played a big part in that. You know, it was already going on before with things like Michael Pollan's book on psychedelics and their potential healing powers. But you know, I think the pandemic has really given people the chance to take a step back, see what's important and what's not important and sort of get rid of a lot of the fluff in their life and start focusing on sort of inner wellbeing, inner practice for some people, spiritual practice or contemplative practices like meditation and yoga. And you know, I think it's helped center us in a lot of ways. It's of course hurt a lot of people deeply as well. But you know, I think that sort of comes with the territory of going through something like this. Yeah, it's becoming more popular for people to be talking about the turn inward. And that's fascinating. I love that, I love that. And that's almost where the seat of unity is. It's all around us in every inhale, but it's most in a sense anchored in its truth when we turn inward and recognize that indescribable nature that we are that is infinity expressing it. And especially when we drop the mind to the heart. And then that's sort of where this unity and this oneness really begins emanating also from that from that turn inward. And so it's so nice to see it becoming more mainstream. And also for science to be giving so much more excitement and funding and allocation of resources to this. And we were talking about this before we started, but the EPRC and having Dan Ingram on the show as well. And you guys being a part of that. And also around everything that's transpired with SEMA Lab, which we'll talk about more as well. And the nuances around the findings around how neurostimulation, neuromodulation can positively affect people's mindfulness, their feelings of coherence and oneness and just brain and behavior also. And this is gonna be so pumped to unpack this. Cool. Awesome to talk about. Cool. Let's do this, Jay. So let's maybe take this from where we kind of left off and where you guys are at now, the last two years have been intensely filled with bringing forth these realizations of the synthesis of science spirituality to mainstream and showing this empirically with data. So let's unpack that. So take us through that journey and then we'll pull up visuals and stuff as we go as needed. Sure. I think the last time we spoke, I had just left the Bay Area where I really was pivoting my entire research career towards what's called contemplative neuroscience in the field. So scientists, I think maybe rightly so are a little bit afraid of the term spiritual and spirituality, partly because it's ill-defined. What's the spirit? How do you measure that in an MRI scanner? So, right, which has its own problems and we can get into that. But I think what you're talking about is inner experience transforming. People can have transformation of their inner experience, their inner life, their inner world through lots of things. Having a child falling in love, somebody near you and dear to you, dying and passing away, psychedelic intervention, lots of ways. Sometimes it just randomly happens to people. So there's lots of ways to have that inner experience transform and there are practices that have been cultivated throughout 2,500 years or so to intentionally cultivate inner well-being, inner happiness and inner self-understanding within Buddhism, for example, the ultimate goal of enlightenment is that we're reaching Nirvana. And so what's really exciting right now and sort of where my life has pivoted is that science is starting to look at these practices and ask, well, what the heck is going on? And many scientists are actually starting to do the practices and going, whoa, my inner world is changing. I want to study that. I want to know what is that? And ultimately, as scientists, we want to use science to help reduce suffering and help the world. And so many of us are looking at these practices and saying, is it possible to strip away these stuff that we can't study, like the religiosocial stuff, the religious stuff? Is it possible to strip that away, keep the practice and find something meaningful for people? Or do you need some of the religious stuff? That's also a possible finding that we'll come to as well. But that's really where we are. You're sort of merging these practices that come from religion and spiritual practices with science and asking, is this a possible paradigm for the future? Now, many of us, like myself and like you, who do these practices like mindfulness, yoga, other things, we have a deep intuition that this will work, that you can blend this stuff with science, create a new paradigm and make it useful for not just weirdos like me and you, but for everybody. I've got family members down in Mississippi who want to use this. I've got friends in Boston and Baltimore. My collaborator Shenzhen is working in China. Can we make paradigms that are useful across the board independent of your background and your inner experience and your past experience and your socioeconomic status and all of that? Can we help people transform their inner lives so that we don't have to go through a pandemic to ask the question, what's meaningful for me? Can we just use these tools in the first place? So that's kind of where we are. We're at the very early stages of blending what are called the wisdom traditions with Western science and trying to see what falls out. And truthfully, I don't know what falls out of it. I think the new science is going to be quite different than even what we think today, but we're at the very beginning of trying to make this a real grounded, empirical scientific paradigm. And it's super exciting. Okay, so what seems to be reoccurringly critical in this process is the simultaneous blend of the wisdom traditions with the Western science and yet also a mainstreamification of the benefits, the applied benefits globally. So let's play with like the mainstreamification and the very sort of simple oil down essence of what we're doing with blending the wisdom traditions and Western science because it really boils down to simple things like increased happiness and less suffering and more openness, more equanimity, these types of things. This is sort of what the core potentially is. Yeah, my dad, self understanding and service to others is probably the deepest one. So yeah, there's lots of components that go into it. Yep, and you might want to also, it's fun to play with the benefits and the positive, but we can also bring up all the pitfalls and the walls that can emerge with this. So there's also the commodification, the mick mindfulness that's also happening, is there too much stripping away? Can you strip away the practices to the point where they're helping with the tension and you can shoot a basketball better, but they're not getting at these things that we just outlined. So that's the other end and the nice thing about science is we can address those questions. And if we're being careful and upfront with our science, we should be creating paradigms where we can catch that as well. Otherwise we'll just be looking over at the benefits and not realizing that they may be causing some damage at the same time. Yeah, very important point. Very, very important point. Yeah, and a lot of it is really boils down to extracting out the most signal, the most essence, and then distilling that to mainstream most relatably. And yeah, not getting lost in the commodification of things or in all of the noise as well. So that's great. So, okay, so let's take a classical portion of neuroscientific research. So we've been hearing a lot about how excessive rumination in default mode network seems to be a big culprit of anxiety, self-referential thoughts about the past or about the future. And that taking people out of peace, out of happiness, out of now presence, out of unity and into separation even. So if I'm not feeling peace and happiness, what am I doing? I'm trying to extract peace and happiness. So are we talking, when we talked about a month ago, we were chatting about things like a decrease in the overactive default mode network and then there being sort of a blossoming of that. That you were calling it internal transformations that unfold for people. And that these internal transformations, these shifts you could say, from suffering to wellbeing or prosperity toward oneness away from separation, that these sort of things come from a neuroscientific consciousness oriented shift. Yeah, that's a great question. So let's define default mode network for people who don't know about it. So it's a region in the brain that's kind of midline that showed up in fMRI studies when people were doing no task. So between tasks in the scanner, sometimes we'll tell people just sit there. It's $400 to $1,000 an hour to do an MRI. So we usually just record everything even if they're not doing a task. And what we found and by we, I mean all my colleagues, not me, what we found is that for most people, cross culture, you tend to see this midline area activate. And that seems to be what people go into when they're not doing anything. It's kind of your default state. It's gonna be different for each person because we all kind of default to different sort of defaults, but it's what's happening when you're driving your car and you kind of mind wonder and yep, there you go. You know, you might wonder. Yeah, you pick up your phone, you go into Facebook, whatever your default sort of, I don't have anything to do, let me take five minutes. Most people have the experience of driving in a car and you look up and you're like, oh crap, how did I get here? Right, so your body was driving and you're up in your mind and your default sort of worrying about the pandemic and whatever politics or whatever you've got going on. So that's the default state and it evolved for purpose. So it's there to sort of help us sort of relax a little bit, not be so engaged if we're constantly engaged with thinking like problem solving. It take a lot of energy. So it's kind of a very relaxed thinking state. Typically people think about their own stuff. So one marker on the default mode network is it's about you. So yeah, so I'm like that autopilot. So it's autopilot, but it's auto self-pilot. Because it's really like you start worrying, you start thinking, you start thinking about dinner. You start thinking about all these different things but it's almost thinking about you and that's a really salient marker of the default mode network. So content will be different. Auto self-pilot. Yeah, cool. Me and Rick Henry just came up with that. Yeah, yeah, shout out. Let's publish a paper, Rick Henry. I think he did. That's somebody in the chat. So yeah, yeah, we pulled up a comment. Yeah. Yeah, we can pull it up on the feed like this. Like we pulled it out when we were talking. Oh, I love that. You'll see more of those throughout, yeah. We also had this earlier. The super excited for Dr. Jay's work. Oh, thank you. Nice name. Yeah, I know. Cool. All right. Yeah, so the DMN, the default mode network, is it's really there to maintain self-processing. You can think of it that way. We're still learning about it as a kind of self-processing. So maintain self-processing. Oh, interesting. OK, cool, cool. That's the way I think about it. There's a lot of debate in the literature about this, different people think different things. But what we do know is that, well, if you think about the self from the point of view of trying to create it, which is, I think, what the brain is doing in the body, it's a big process. It's a lot of activation and processing and computation. The self is not an easy thing to make. And then once it's made, it needs to be maintained. If someone hurts your feelings, you need to think about it. Like, why did Alan say that thing to me, I gotta go think about that. Does that mean I'm stupid or is Alan stupid? I gotta think about that for a little while. And eventually, I have to get myself to a point where I feel OK. I need a baseline level of OK-ness, but I also need to be able to take feedback from you, think about myself. Do I need to work on my tone a little bit because Alan said I don't sound good on the microphone? I'm getting all this input and I gotta take that in, I gotta do something with it and I gotta do the self-stuff. So that's the default mode network. It's super important. We never wanna make it go away. But in things like depression, things like anxiety, things like a pandemic where you're watching negative news, then what can happen in that state is it tends to go negative and negative can go overdrive. And so depression, for example, is like those people just ruminate. They just negative, negative, negative. Every moment they get to think to themselves, it's like the world is burning. There's no point. Why is Alan looking at me? You know, it just goes like that and that and that. And that then perpetuates negative mood and it perpetuates the whole inner sort of, what's that nine-inch nail song where he's talking about being in the whole, right? Like you're just going further and further into that black hole. And that becomes a problem because at a certain point you just can't get out. Now, if you look at the other end, so that would be default mode on hyperdrive. And I can see that in the MRI. If I take a depressed person and I put them in the MRI, you can actually see too much activation. Now, here's what's interesting. If you take a massive dose of psilocybin, magic mushrooms, MDMA, LSD, any of the major psychedelics, the first thing you see is that that default mode network goes zoop, turns way down. And it seems, there's a couple of really early studies, but it seems like the more you turn the default mode network down, the more ego death you experience. Yes. And the term in the literature has actually died. Oh, I'm forgetting the term, but it's something like direct ego death. It spells died, so ego died. So, and the ego death experience actually predicts clinical outcomes. So, if you have PTSD patients, for example, and they take some 5MEO DMT and they, you measure the stuff in the MRI scanner, those people are good for weeks sometimes after one session, if you can get that default network to really shut down and the report of the self having a literal ego death, like, oh my God, it was scary, my ego died, but now I see how I can heal myself. You know, it's kind of what people report. Now, those are the two ends of the spectrum with the default mode network. Most people were right in the middle. When you start meditating, guess what happens? That DMN starts going off, but only when you meditate. So, in the scanner, and you're meditating, even if I put you in, I would see, relative to your baseline, that your default mode network is just turning off just a little bit, not like a psychedelic, but you know, you're starting to get that to decrease. And my friend, Jud Brewer, published a bunch of beautiful studies where he was showing this in meditators. And so, it now becomes a target for intervention. So, if I have someone with depression and I have a device that can target specifically the default mode network, can I help reduce their rumination just a little bit so they get a little psychological freedom, right? And then, if I can get some psychological freedom, can I do some therapy in that state? Or, you know, get them to interact with their loved ones or work or whatever they need to do so that the system can kind of bootstrap out of that crappy state and into a new state. So, yeah, that's the fascination with the default mode network. It's a pretty cool thing. We still don't know too much about it at this point, but yeah, it's becoming an interesting target. This is so fascinating. So, we could potentially say that evolutionarily that as over the last couple of millions of years that the creature, the vehicle of the creature became advanced enough neurophysiologically to be to have a self-referential model and then to basically perpetuate said self-referential model based on biological fitness. And then basically every time that it would not be doing a task, like if it's not hunting or cooking or making textiles or whatever, moving, et cetera, trading, all that type of stuff, then it's basically in its relaxed state between actions that it's usually ruminating on what happened in my self-referential model in terms of the past. What can I learn from that? What can I avoid? Like what pains can I avoid in the future? And then there's like the future, like it's kind of like a Monte Carlo tree search in computer science. So it's like running all these little simulations of future possibilities and trajectories self-referentially. Oh, if Jay does this activity, then Jay will get this fruit up in the tree. And so there's that activity. So it's almost like the self-referential model that relaxed time turned into like avoiding pain, seeking pleasure, and then that further perpetuated the self-referential model. And it also further perpetuates like unhappiness with now, with the, there's not much gratitude for what is now. Like what about now? Like is this not absolutely beautiful? Like how two seemingly individuated humans in a universe are having a conversation across computer technology on a rock orbiting a star? Like, you know, you get to a way of being able to describe the now so profoundly that you realize how ridiculous it sounds like for you to take five minutes and then like have to jump on this device and have to incessantly scroll. And you realize that during the five minutes, if you sort of work on this default mode network, you can sort of over time quiet down that excessive stimulation. And then now you're beginning to get into what some of the mystics have also been figuring out is well, what happens when you have these, these complete cessations of pain, of pleasure, so of craving and aversion, but also of this self-referential model itself. So that's something that we could probably table and put a little bit further, but that plays directly into what you were saying around entheogens and ego death and then this feelings of, oh my gosh, universal consciousness or unbounded energy, emptiness, that all of these things come up and the realization of we're all God, this is all one intelligence at play with itself comes up and then science is like, how do we compute this? How do we compute this? Right. Yeah, so we'll let's maybe put the self-referential model the self-referential model completely sort of a little bit further, but it's fascinating evolutionarily how it looks like that's exactly what kind of like uptick over time is that process and how it's potential that, would you say that with everything that you're looking at and what Sam was looking at and whatnot that sort of the default mode network and then also the neuro stimulation for the decreased overactivity, would you say that that's one of the top findings that you're figuring out? That's one of the main focuses of the lab. We sort of do projects, we can only do so many a semester based on funding and things like that. So we're sort of going at the heart of what we think will in our lab actually facilitate mindfulness practice. So that's what we're doing in my lab, which is called Similab. I co-direct that with Shenzhen Young, who's a very well-known mindfulness teacher in the United States. And in Similab, we're trying to find, we're trying to understand how does the brain change with right now mindfulness practice, but we're interested in other practices. And then once we understand that, can we safely target that with things like neuro stimulation or feedback like neuro feedback using EEG? Can we target those systems while people are meditating to give you something that helps you learn the mindfulness skills, the mindfulness practice. So we don't want things that work as dramatically as psychedelics because we can get into that. I think although they work really well, that is a temporary state and that doesn't lead to lifelong change actually. And I want to be very clear because people are asking here, I think psychedelic interventions are great medicines, but it's not just getting the person to the state and even to the ego death. I don't think that that will be enough to save humanity from climate change or something that some people are claiming. You need to have a way to integrate that information, integrate that insight and integrate the skill of being calm, having equanimity, having a focused attention, getting out of the default state when you need to give your talk on a stage or whatever you're doing. You need, all of these things need to be integrated back into the nervous system and the body. And so really what we're focused on is the first part, how do you understand the brain when it changes with meditation, maybe even psychedelics? Can you target those systems with neuro technology to help people meditate with more ease? And then if that happens, does that actually help them integrate these practices into their life so that they're happier, they're having better relationships with their family, they're having more fulfillment from walking on a trail in nature, all the things that really we're trying to get to. Does all this stuff in the lab translate into life? And that's the hardest part to me actually is. Even with psychedelics, most of us probably on this chat here have been to concerts and places where people have done a lot of psychedelics and those people aren't often the model human. They're beautiful people with lots of insight, but you probably wouldn't want those people running society. So there's got to be some other trick to help us integrate these things in a way that are pragmatic and practical for having a society where we all have to interact with each other. And so that's really that integration part, that's the last step of the lab. And as you're talking about with identity, that's the core, because really what we're talking about is the sense of self and it's suffering, deeply for all of us, if we're being truthful. And some people are suffering with things like depression and chronic pain, but the rest of us are suffering with a lot of other things. And that self is attached, it identifies with that, which is totally understandable and useful. But that stuff can go haywire and it can lead us down a path where ultimately at the end of our lives, we are on our deathbeds and we go, oh my God, why was I so attached to my Porsche 911 and my giant house and my job? Like it's my family and nature and oh my God, climate change is happening and I'm dying and it's 2050. Why didn't I do anything about that? It takes like getting to death before people get there. And that's because of the way that the self is built and what it thinks is important and what it's attached to and what is threatening, which is a whole big piece of like all this threat, I gotta take care of my family so I gotta go work 70 hours a week and whatever. Realizing that your family could be okay with half the income and you don't need all this crap. So you're really getting at that system of self identity and attachment and trying to understand how does it work and how can you modulate that in a safe way through meditation practice, psychedelics, sports, all kinds of things will modulate it. But how do you modulate it in a safe way? So you still go to work, you're just not so attached to a 80 hour work week. You realize you can get the same amount of work done with 40 hours and you can have more equanimity. Oh, and by the way, you can have more fulfillment at work, you can get to all that so you can kind of detach and get back out and do what's important. And so I think these questions about identity and self and like how those systems work, that's the crucial stuff that we're really working on. That's great because as Buddha pointed to with dependent origination that the first link in all of this is from source, what is the identity? What is the identity? What is, is it knowledge or is it ignorance? And knowledge means that you know anata or no self. And then versus ignorance of it means that you are attached to the sense of I, me, mine. And then then the cycle of samsara kicks in which is craving and aversion and indifferences. And that right there is the, you could even say that that's like the core of how this dimension of creation even works. This entire extent of creation appears to play in a way like you have all of this differentiation of all of these costumes where you have this apparent J unit and this apparent Atlas Allen unit and that then these units have the same underlying essence that everything is a boundless energy. I play with itself, but then fascinatingly enough on the surface when it comes into shape, name, form, costume there is the appearance of it being different which then further perpetuates the sense of I being here and that sense of I being there and then that being separate from each other and needing to extract from one another. So the one this becomes veiled. So you could even say that the entire creation plays off of that initial link in everything or in as said independent origination that everything is interpenetrating itself as vibration, as energy, even as, you know quantum mechanics eludes that everything is absolutely non-local it's absolutely entangled. You can't come to an understanding of how a zero point energy ends up creating of the quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics that then produce said cells that are recursive that make these 30 trillion unit vehicles. It's absolutely mind boggling. And so then that right there before anything else is if we start with that sense of self that sense of identity and deconstruct the shit out of it first and foremost that that can then be one of the biggest like rocket ships for us in our awakening but then there's the simple shit like you just said which is very important, which is bro you're on a walk, you're literally on a walk and like you love like walks, come on man you're not supposed to be thinking about oh my God all this stuff in the past or oh my God all this stuff in the future like we all know that that's not the right way to take a walk. Like you're supposed to take a walk and completely relax and enjoy the beauty of the sun enjoy the beauty of the trees and of the birds and the bees and enjoy the person that you're with be grateful for your life be grateful for the air that you're breathing be grateful for the water and the food and the roof over your head. And if this is again a very simple style of shift into that type of a mentality as you're like also Buddha called it a non meditation that your entire day's life is not a meditation it's not supposed to be something that you go and sit on a cushion but rather it's an every moment of your life is the very wakeful state. So yeah, so that's a really important resident and it also makes a lot of sense given what you said with neurofeedback because I feel like one of the big things that we're shifting to moving forward is that and perhaps this is something that I don't know if you guys have been looking into this as well or potentially even doing it or know of people doing it but it's really exciting is haptics for neurofeedback so that you're getting a tactical signal about when you're getting AI biometric readouts that are then signaling to you when you're going into a state of perpetuating your sense of self and craving an aversion versus when you're in a state that's a lot more coherent and so you have to feedback along that process. So yeah, so what are the types of existing yeah, ways of, I know, I love the like fractally nature of the play, the tennis that's happening because there's so many ways for you to play with that. So take, yeah, if there was a thread that you liked in the last bit, you can take from that and also just take from the, especially the leveraging AI and biometrics and neurofeedback on assisting people on less offering more happiness. Sure, I was laughing too at the chat. I love it. I taught during the pandemic, I had a class with 300 students on Zoom and I left the chat open and yeah, it gets fun pretty quickly. So keep your chat, we'll speak to them. I did want to say one thing in the chat. I made a comment about people doing psychedelics not running the country. I should clarify. What I mean by that is any, like I said, I think psychedelics are definitely healing, especially used in the right context. But I think that Timothy Leroy's insight that the set and setting is crucial to the experience that you have and actually the insights that you have. I would take it further though and also say what you do after, so the larger context of what's your intention, why are you doing these in the first place? And I've been accused of this in my own research, which is that we have this society that's really looking for the pill, the red pill or the blue pill, right? Our favorite movie, The Matrix is all about this. You just take the pill and you wake up. That might not be how the nervous system works. It might be. So there's traditions and Buddhism, for example, that have argued something along that. Once you understand the true nature of yourself and reality, it shifts, everything shifts. That's a possibility and a hypothesis in science that I'm very interested in. Could also be the case though that the nervous system, mine is 37, I'll be 38 this next month. There's 38 years of neural memory, not just in my brain, but in my spine and all the way in every cell in my body. The cells have memory, the DNA probably, RNA, all this stuff in here, all the machinery is shaped by experience. And so one thing that I'm very careful about and even in my own thinking is to look for just the special pill or the special device that I can just put on and it somehow hits the right button and then you're done. You're enlightened and you see the true nature of reality and everything. And I think that we have built into our psychologies probably through evolution, this bypass. There's something built into us that if you take the right mushrooms and humans have been taking mushrooms for a long time, it seems like you can have an experience that feels like the truth and you become certain of that truth. And then you start telling everyone about that truth. And then as you talk about it, the sense of self reifies, the ego sort of reifies, makes it more real than it was when you experienced it. And there are these sort of psychological biasing mechanisms that we've studied in the field for other reasons but I've really sort of been thinking about a paper of sort of psychological biasing mechanisms as applied to inner shifts, inner experience. And Buddhism, for example, has been talking about spiritual bypass and the sort of pitfalls that you can fall in in Buddhism, the sort of traps that you can get stuck in. There's lots of different traps. Shinsen, my collaborator actually writes about this in his book as like four levels as your consciousness sort of gets cleaned up. And at the third level, there's this sort of magic stuff that happens. Lots of weird psychological powers and things that happen and there's whole sort of sex of Buddhism based on these powers. You can get stuck and what Shinsen says is you can actually get stuck lateral. So you get in this power realm, you got Kriyas and you got these energies popping out of your mind and you're seeing the world in a completely perceptually different way and you start practicing, you start going lateral. So you're gaining more power in this realm and you think you're getting towards enlightenment if that's your goal, but you're actually getting, you're going horizontal with enlightenment. You're not going down towards it, you're actually going this way and things are happening and you can talk about them and you're very sure that you're getting closer to enlightenment, but you're actually in a trap. And I'm super fascinated by these traps because I think there might be a sort of a protection mechanism built into us to fall into these traps so that we don't get lost in the void or nothingness, right? Because as an embodied human being, I can't hang out in the void all day. I need to feed the metabolism systems in my body. I gotta get some outer energy in even if it's not actually separate in some quantum physics way, right? And so the psychology for some random reasons may have figured out a way to get us trapped into that lateral dimension so that we can keep functioning in the world even if it's sort of taking us further away from the truth. And we're getting stuck in this, what's now being termed a spiritual bypass. We're sort of getting stuck in this experience and the ego is getting looped and talking about it and telling everyone about it. But the psychological cleanup or the development or the growth that actually could be taking place is getting bypassed and you're just telling everyone how enlightened you are. And so I'm equally as worried about that as creating tech to get people there. And as a scientist, all of this is fascinating, the fact that this seems to happen to people across the spectrum. So anyway, sorry, I wanted to bring that up because it's a worry that some of us have and we see it. We see these spiritual teachers, Buddhist teachers who molest their students and steal and do all kinds of, what seemed like horrible things, they are horrible things from the outside. And you gotta ask, well, what's going on? This person's been meditating for 60 years and you meet some of these people which I've gotten the deep pleasure to meet. And they do seem highly transformed from the inside. And as a sort of psychologist and neuroscientist I look at these people and I say, actually I do think that they're real in the sense that they have transformed their inner life but the way the psychology works is they've just bypassed some of the stuff. And so there's still inner trauma, maybe from their childhood or whatever that's in the biology that's emerging as a behavior and they're just have no conscious access to it. They actually don't have awareness or they do and they have somehow tricked themselves that it's okay because they're helping people or whatever, right? And so as a scientist, that's super fascinating that that can happen. As a person making a piece of technology to try to help more people get there, I also need to be highly aware that that's a possible outcome. Yeah, sorry, that was a little bit of a rant. But yeah, the thing is the point here is some of this isn't free. Just waking up, knowing your true self, seeing the void, having deep psychological insights still doesn't make you a good person. That's a social thing and that still I think has to be developed as a skill. Compassion, for example, empathy, these things may come a little bit for free but I think you also have to just train your nervous system to get to those things. Maybe even being a good parent, I mean, maybe if you have a child and you wake up, so to speak, that may not necessarily make you motivated to take care of your child. So you might need to have something else there to help that happen. Yeah, this is one point. For me and for many others, what's happened along the journeys is that there are these vertical breakthroughs in terms of realizations, direct experience of more and more of infinite reality. And then what happens is immediately upon realization, what happens upon a vertical integration of a higher density of awareness, love, light, let's say, that then there's an immediate egoification of said realization in a horizontal way where the sense of self almost immediately clicks back at a lesser level, but it clicks back. And the only word that so far that it really encompasses the entirety of the spiritual journey all the way to self-realization and beyond is purification. It's deconditioning. It's disentanglement. It's unraveling or deconstructing all separation, every single last little particle of separation of conditioning. And that's the only way to do it if you wanna go all the way. Otherwise, like Jay just said, you're gonna get stuck at one of these horizontal layers after a vertical realization and you see this all the time. You see people's speaking enlightenment, but speaking it also quite clearly from a place that has some sort of like visible childhood conditioning that emerging simultaneously. So yeah, so that's really, really, really important from what Jay mentioned there. And so it's because it makes it so that you really have to ask yourself if this is a full-time job because that's what it is. Like the synthesis of science of spirituality and enlightenment and awakening and service to others like you said earlier, that is a full-time job. It just, it's a full-time job. It comes your entire life. You incarnated potentially for this exact reason to come here to awaken and then serve the creation, awakening. And so this is really, really a critical point of the conversation. Yeah, and I just to pick on our two springboard off of this notion of purification. What's happening in the nervous system in the body is that there's multiple levels, fractals, mandalas. However you wanna think about this, it's even visual perception, which is my background is like an insanely complicated hierarchy of processing. But that hierarchy is not just in the brain. It's the brain-body connection. And it's actually the body-to-body connection. And it's the body as a people to history connection. And then if you go inside the cell, it's the DNA to history. It's, you know, so this whole thing, like you're a vibration of vibrations if you wanna think about it like that. And these vibrations are all inter-dynamically acting in the brain and the body. So let me give you one example. I was on a call the other day with one of my scientific heroes, his name is Clemesh. And he actually showed that the peak beats, so the heartbeat, if you take the peaks of the heartbeat, let's say, you know, it's so many beats per minute, that predicts the alpha peak in the EEG of the brain individually. So right now if I could record your heartbeat and I could record your EEG brain electrical activity, I could look at your heartbeat and it would be predicting something very important about your brain activity, right? So they're dynamically nested all the way down. Your brain activity is nested to your heart fundamentally. And so purification can happen, I think at many different levels. And that's again, where this trap happens because I might think that I've cleared my trauma, you know, from something that happened in childhood. But that trauma may be stored in my muscle memory as much as it's stored in my actual memory that I can consciously access. But again, what'll happen is I'll do all this trauma work and I'll purify it and I'll clean it and I'll tell you I've done it, but it's still down in the heart rhythm, right? There's another piece that was physical because that trauma that happened to me was a physical thing, not just a mental thing. And so purification also happens at multiple levels all this is changing. And again, as a scientist that leads me to think that this is just a lifetime process. So even if you feel consciously that I purified that trauma and you can talk about it and have insights about it, it's probably not done and you gotta keep doing it. And you probably gotta do some practice that gotta do some weird body movement practice or whatever, right? There's other things that you're not even aware of yet that are going to be needed to actually help the whole system purify and then realign. And again, that's where I think in the future we might have a model of that like in 2100 or something. We'll have a model of what we mean by purification which is so exciting to me. Gosh, you're so spot on. We're really riding on the same vibration there because if you think about it, isn't to an extent the model of evolution that we have of the formation of the self-referential entities? Isn't there also the same thing in terms of now we have a model of deconstruction and purification of said self-referential entity to its primordial oneness. Yeah, so it's beautiful because you can basically find a power law of the most common conditionings and then also a power law of the most common ways to decondition those conditionings. So like one of the most common ones is unworthiness or like seeking validation. Right, like I'm gonna feel whole by acquiring followers or by gaining money or by having women like me. That's like the most common one that we fall into and that if we, that also means there's a pattern of liberation from those conditionings of the essence seeking validation and there's nothing more liberating than what I've had in direct experience with liberation from those conditionings and the more and more it becomes full and complete and realized embodied in my essence in my heart and in my gut, the more that I feel like a Jedi or a ninja or I just feel like I'm gliding through the field rather than being the fixation and attachments on all those different points that would then take you into a vortex. And so that's also very profound is when you think about those nested layers like you said that there's this nested connection. It's almost like it's probably has a lot to do with oxygenation, like oxygenation of the brain, the heart and then the oxygenation and then that enabling the connectomics to do its thing. So that rhythmic is so that's fascinating. And then, yeah, it's probably also good for us to play on. Like if we were to pull up, if we have any of these, if you feel like there's any insights from some of these things that we were looking at together before we started, I think these would be quite helpful for people. So this is, so you actually were talking about this earlier but this here is where you've identified as a default mode sort of between the two hemispheres to an extent. Right, yeah, and that study here, we're using ultrasound. So this is a way to basically get energy into the brain to modulate it. And believe it or not, you can use high frequency sound to modulate the ion channels and perhaps some other properties of the neurons to briefly, safely modulate. We're talking about low energy ultrasound less around the same range that they use for fetal imaging with ultrasound. So you can focus that beam of ultrasound through the skull and that's what you're seeing here is this red bit is where the ultrasound is focused. That's focusing on the interior cingulate which is a part of the brain that helps you focus your attention. And we're interested in that for meditation training. But yeah, this is kind of our model. So we're trying to model the ultrasound to make sure it's safe for where we're targeting for people. Do you feel like the ACC, the interior cingulate cortex do you feel like, so that area you would say is heavily involved in attention? Yeah, it's involved in control of attention and actually monitoring error. And this brings us back to the default mode network. So these, of course, all these networks are interconnected in some way. And what's going on with modern person is we're bombarded by threat, fear, the news and all this stuff is tilted towards threatening you to get you engaged. And even Facebook in a sense is designed to kind of get you riled up and threat oriented. They always seem to show you the right people to like push your buttons. And so the interior cingulate cortex is the part of the brain that's monitoring for those threats and those errors. And whenever something comes at you and you make an error or a mismatch, it sort of sends a signal to another part of the brain to tell you to pay attention. But in meditation, it's probably also the part of the brain that's noticing when your attention wonders and it's telling you, oh, bring your attention back. Right, and that bring your attention back is a really crucial step in training for mindfulness. That's part of the ACC. And so we think that we can up-regulate that a little bit while you're learning to meditate. And that'll help you learn that skill a little bit faster. Now, what's really cool about that is that if you meditate for like two years or five years, what tends to happen is that that process becomes automatic and implicit. And so when you talk about the default state, the longer-term meditators default state is to be monitoring for their attention. Even if they're not thinking consciously, the brain just starts doing it automatically. That happens to me like after a long retreat, you go for 10 days of meditation and then at the end, you're just present and you kind of know where your attention is and what's grabbing it and you can kind of feel your mind like, oh, I wanna go read about Donald Trump and you're like, ah, look at that. Like maybe I shouldn't do that just yet. I should just stay here. So yeah, that's the ACC. It's a fascinating part of the brain. Wow. So to an extent, the ACC being the controlling of attention that to an extent, we could say that this, like bringing your attention back could be spirituality has been called abiding. So you're abiding as this one infinite mystery rather than abiding as the contracted form of self that's seeking validation externally. You're abiding in presence, energy or unconsciousness or in God or self-realization. Cool. I love that word abiding. It always after retreats, that's the word. It's like, you're just abiding. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's pretty cool. ACC abiding, it could be a pretty cool neuro. If it's possible to make a neuroscientific correlate to spirituality like that, that would be really cool. Nice. Because even during the day, like Bantino Massaro has a really popular aphorism. It goes two to five seconds. Just relax, all thoughts, all conceptualizations, all ideas, all discursive thinking. And this also dates back to like Dzogchen and mystic Buddhism as well. And it's just literally just for those two to five seconds just have a cessation of all of this neuroscientific like cascades of like triggers of thinking and concepts and discursive thoughts emotions, emotions, et cetera. And what you do during that time is you abide, right? So you think that's the beauty of it, is that if you do this process more and more often as it's called like somebody, you kind of go into the state of absorption of meditation that it basically becomes 15 seconds, then it becomes a minutes. And then before you know it, you're just sitting there in the middle of a fucking loud roomful of people or whatever. And you're in Samadhi for like 20 minutes while you're just in a roomful of loud people and all you are is you're the very field itself that's playing in itself. You're the whole thing. And you're nowhere and everywhere and it's indescribable. And that like you said, it's something that's trained. It's not something that's pilled. The nervous system can't just pill itself into that. Not yet, but yeah. But it's cool because you can use entheogens along with practices like do nothing meditation or vipassana or just basic mindfulness or going on fucking walks or all these very basic things as well. And as you do that self-inquiry, self-inquiry, such a simple one, logical as well, that the combination of those things will lead you to more and more abiding. So in a sense, would you say that it's like a strengthening of the ACC? In the beginning it is, but then what we find is that as it becomes from explicit or conscious, like you have to work at it to implicit, then the ACC goes back to baseline. And that's what's really cool. That's so crazy. That's so real. It's saying like something more than the ACC is changing. And I think again, what you just so beautifully described gets back to this question of identity and self. At a certain point you start asking, what am I really? Am I these thoughts? Am I this body? Am I this word? What is, what's really going on? And this gets into the sort of metaphysics of Buddhism, which is a fun topic. But you start getting insight into what's really here and how does it work? And you start watching the body make these connections between emotion and thoughts and drives and behavior. But if you can just rest what Shenzhen calls gone, which means just having a rest of sensation and perception and you can abide there for a minute, that's also conscious experience. And you can get to a point to which some people call non-dual consciousness, which is there's a conscious awareness field that has no content or object or separation or anything and it's just this field of nothing, a beautiful void of beautiful nothingness. That's a possible experience that plenty of people report on. And it turns out that the more that you get there through whatever method, the more sort of relaxation and positive vibes you get, it can cause you to have sort of weirdness in the beginning, but as you stabilize that, it's a bliss. In the jhanic practices, jhana practices, there's PT, the first level, which is just this overwhelming bliss and love and joy. And then you can keep going, you can stabilize that until you get to nothingness. And at a certain point, the system goes, is that me? Am I also that? Or am I just the thoughts and the body and the attachments and all this stuff? And so again, for me, that's why this gets to the deepest question of what am I? Who am I? What am I identifying with? Why am I identifying with that? And is it possible for me to identify with not that? And if I can identify with not that, well, what does that mean? And you're stepping through and getting all these insight along the way. So yeah, fun stuff. Gosh, that's so rich. Yeah, that is, we're really at one of the main ways that the game is played, which has been taught as a netty netty, not this, not that. You really have to have a fire under your ass to play the game. But if the fire under the ass is bright enough and has enough earnestness, then you can play the netty netty game shows up. And when it does, it becomes something that you perpetually do. It's kind of interesting. So the ACC increases and it's like ability to maintain netty netty or abide. And then over time, then even that gets transcended because it's not needed anymore. And then it becomes like an AI that runs in the background, which is also what Buddha said. It's a non meditation, which is perfect. It's just a, again, like a wakeful state. Yeah, cool. Wow. Somebody's asking about depersonalization. So this is an interesting experience that people have in the clinic, not just with mindfulness and meditation. This is the experience that you're sort of not in your body or somehow separate in a way that's not functional, usually in the clinic. So this is a diagnosable issue for people. It can happen with certain drug induced states as well, but it also happens on retreats, meditation retreats and yoga retreats. And this is part of the sort of dark side of these practices that as you're modulating self and as the self, maybe let's say you slip into this Samadhi for the first time and nobody told you about it, you weren't warned and you just popped into it. That can be very scary, actually. It's not a fun experience for people. And if you've already got some underlying instability of the self, maybe due to past trauma or something that's unresolved, now you've got a situation where the person, the sense of self wants to protect itself and so it just pops out and you get this depersonalization, derealization problem. That's happened. It's been reported on retreats. I have a good friend, Daniel Ingram, who's an ER doctor and he would have people show up in a state like that at the ER at the hospital and they get diagnosed as bipolar or schizophrenia or something, but it turns out that they're having what's called a spiritual emergency. And Daniel is working very hard to actually get the medical establishment to realize that these people can be treated not with drugs that they treat something like bipolar with, but actually you just do some inner practice and you pop back into your body and now you know about the void or now you know about Samadhi or something to give you the framework so you can understand what's happening to you. So that's where basically knowing about these potential alterations of consciousness can be really helpful, but if you don't warn people of it, then it can kind of spin out into this other direction. Unfortunately, we're always changing and so whatever happens to us now has to be integrated into future self and that's just the way the thing works, you know? And another thing is that who is it that is worried about depersonalization? You mean from a subjective point of view? Yeah, and of course for our homie, John Ferrer of course, who posed the question, but also in general, of course there are what you could call crevices. There are these like crevices that you can fall into like you were describing, it's very, very important because if there's not that stabilization like the landing strip community and optimal ways to continue set service to others and set awakening and whatnot, that then there can be issues, but which we're sowing the fabric well to make there less, to be less crevices, but at the same time, this is the exact thing that people run away from. This is the number one thing people run away from is the question, who are you? What are you? What is I? And it's the question people run away from because they don't want to depersonalize. They don't want to transpersonalize. That's another way to think about it is transpersonalization because we've become so accustomed to singularly the individuated unit by itself. And I don't, it's really scary for someone to begin being like, well, actually, this is the one talking to itself, like Atlas talking to Jay is the one talking to itself. And the field is what it is, is what we are. We are that. And you can't find it anywhere because it's vibration, it's that emptiness in dancing and yet it's also everything. It's every single one of the atoms, it's every single one of the words that are being vibrated across the internet right now and being received in that apparent location. And so now you're really screwed because now you went from a place of like spending years, decades even, cultivating a sense of self and cultivating a mentality that I am going to solidify my sense of self. And now when you're going through more and more of the awakening, you're becoming more and more deconstructing of that sense of self that you were investing so much time into. It's depersonalizing and transpersonalizing and you can find that either liberating or you can find it scary. It's your will and choice, whichever way you see it. But I promise you that if you take this all the way, it's kind of like biology or art or any other field. If you basically stop at like researching a protein and you never go all the way to the DNA or you never go all the way to like bioengineering and eradicating pathologies or whatever or an art if you stop at paint and you never learn like digital animation or writing or poetry as well, that what will happen is you'll note is that you'll get stuck in yourself in that specific thing and that you won't actually notice all of the beautiful potentiality that exists when you pick up all of the field, when you pick that all up as yourself. Because that's what true compassion comes from as well. Is when you're coming from a sense of self, compassion is for validation. But when you're coming from a place that's empty of self, when you're coming from a place of the field, compassion becomes more and more incrementally, completely, purely in service. And so that's the big shift as well. You actually, you don't even know how you behave right now into the field until you empty yourself out more and more of your personhood and its conditions and separations. And then you actually gain sensitivity and subtlety with how you put every word into the field. And that's a whole nother level of awakening. Just saying, oh, I'm God, everything's God. That's one layer of it. And then there's more beyond that, which is all of the subtlefication, the purification like we were describing during our conversation. So, yeah, there's still a lot. I mean, I know that we will wrap that given we also spent like 45 minutes just preparing with technicalities and stuff. So, but next time what we'll do is we'll, we already, this is a good, what we did Jay's, we did a lot of sort of preparatory work after this two year. So we took two years, the first gap was two years. And we, this episode sort of did a good amount of you could say like the 2000 end of 2021 like foundation. So that way if we revisit potentially we could do one of these maybe like three times a year or something like that. And we could revisit every four months or whatever. We could revisit exactly, we could, we can build on top of the foundation. Like at the beginning of 2022, we can start like building on top of the foundation that we just laid down here. And yeah, cool. Love to, yeah, we're working on a model of sort of neuroethics that shapes the way that we could have this discussion, but also shapes the way that you create the tech so that you can even ask the question, am I getting into that inner phenomenological space, that inner space of experience? You know, how do I even make sure that that thing is changing in the right way? The right way is an ethical question, not a scientific question, but you know, we're trying to create a framework where we can use science to test that ethical framework. So I think we've made a nice foundation and sure next time we could, I could give you the model, you know, and we could look at that, it'd be pretty cool. Cool, yeah. Actually neuroethics is also a big one with BrainMind, Michael McCullough, the BrainMind team. Yep, yeah, that's great. He's a good friend. And yeah, they're working very hard. They're going to have an Asilomar meeting where they come up with some neuroethics guidelines. And so yeah, I'm hoping to have something prepared to sort of show at that conference. That's awesome. Happening, people are talking about it and we're asking, you know, we're asking the hard questions and you know, well, we're going to get there. We just got to get through a couple rough patches as a human species and as an earth system. But you know, we're working on it. Everyone, I think everyone at this point needs to be working on it. And also as you do see it as like this hardest questions type thing, also like just tune in to the simplicity of the heart at the same time. And yeah, yeah, so we got to balance that out because it's cool finding the ACC and all this unique insights, like neuroscientific correlates to abiding or whatnot. Very cool stuff. Yet at the same time, it can really boil down to like these profound like, I believe Rumi was one of them that said this and maybe Khalil Gibran was another, but just quotes like, between all of the words that we speak, so much love is lost. Yeah. And yeah, so you can really like. That's good. You can really boil this down as well in simple child like heart like ways too. Very good. Yeah. Very good, very good. Cool, Jay, is there another important thing that we need to wrap the conversation with or do you feel like we're intention fulfilled? I think we're good. I would leave your listeners with a concept that we can bring up next time. It's called epistemic appropriateness. And I think it gets to the heart of that Rumi quote. Actually, I love that because the question is, what's the point of quantifying the mind and measuring the heart rate and even measuring people who can get into a John estate and the MRI? Like what's the real point? There's a scientific point to me which is understand mechanism. And I'm a geek, I want mechanism. But from a human species point of view, what's the point? And there's this new phrase called epistemic appropriateness, which basically says, is this Fitbit? Is the information that I'm gleaning from it appropriate for me to understand myself? Is it useful or not? And VR, you're bringing up VR, that's another place where we start understanding our experiences through a representation instead of through our eyeballs. And at a certain point, you can get to the point where you're understanding yourself through VR instead of understanding yourself through your own body senses. And that's a really big philosophical, uh-oh, like we're getting into this weird territory. And so the idea that we're sort of working on here is to say, all this information, all this quantifying, all this showing you your data is important if and only if it's working to the human fulfillment agenda, to the human agenda. It's gotta get back to that inner, what's happening with the inner thing and how it knows itself. So anyway, maybe we can start there on the next one because that's the place where I'm really trying to dig in and really understand, you know, how do you give the appropriate amount of information to help you on your own personal journey of understanding yourself and being happy and having good relationships and all the stuff I think we're trying to get to. Damn, nice. Yeah, that's such a good way to wrap. That's such a good epistemic appropriate. And that's very interesting. Yeah, and I would suggest to people too, like as I'm thinking about this, I'm doing this in my own life. I'm wearing something that's tracking my sleep. And the question is, is it actually making me have better sleep or not? I don't know. Yeah, I agree with that. So yeah, I urge you to think about it. Every single, one of the most simple ones is this. It's that this is one of the most simple ones, bro. Like... Is it useful for you or not? And is it helping you be useful for other people? That's the question. And actually everyone, I feel like everyone really knows deep in their heart because everyone has this experience when they finish scrolling that they go, damn, I just wasted so much time. Mm-hmm. Not all the time, not everyone all the time, but a lot of people, a lot of the time have that experience, which is that's a big indicator. So wow, so then that's a pretty, like let's look in and investigate that because we're talking about neuro-tech and human flourishing, but the thing that billions of people have around the planet right now that is tech that directly influences neurology is so saliently distracting us from potential actualizations that are going latent or dormant because of the styles of programming and design that we've implanted with them. So there's a lot of these that just with epistemic appropriateness, very cool. Yeah. Very cool. Awesome. Beautiful, and also there's links in the bio below as well. Let me actually, let me pull them up here on our second scoring. So the first link down in the bio is the SEMA lab. So that's semelab.arizona.edu, Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness. And you can find more information here about the team, about research, about some of the news. Oh, there's some good content on here. One of them is a recent Guardian video that was published on the work. That's a really strong short video. Highly recommend checking this out. Also Jay giving us TEDx talk, great interview. Guru Viking and also Jay's talk at BrainMind. So, oh yeah. And then there's also, so check this link out in the bio. And then there's also the Center for Consciousness. And this is also a University of Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies. And here, this is Roger Penrose and Stuart Hamroff, right? They're both deeply intertwined here, yes? Yep, yeah, Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize last year. So we dedicated a small short conference to him this year. So it was all on black hole theory and consciousness, quantum consciousness, you know, these concepts. And it's all free on YouTube. So I'd recommend watching. There's some awesome, awesome lectures and content on black holes and consciousness and, you know, sort of the edge of science in a sense. Yep, there they are. Oh nice, these just went up a week ago. Yep, the conference was earlier in August. We just got all the content up, so good stuff. Nice, very cool. So very, very cool. So guys, check this out as well. So again, that's the Center for Consciousness Studies and you can find the link to the YouTube channel here as well. And yeah, and then also you can find a Jay's website as well. So you have Jay's website as well, link down there. You can go and follow him, LinkedIn, Twitter. You can also go follow Shins and Young as well. And awesome. So let's wrap. I'll get you, get you going. Nice, yeah, cool. I'm glad we had some love in the comments. Thanks, fam. We love you so much. Thanks for tuning in. Yeah, thanks for tuning in, guys. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below also. So write us your thought in the comments. We would love to hear from you about the episode about what Jay was sharing with us. Also, if you haven't yet, subscribe to the channel. Also like the video as well that helps the algorithm share the video with other people that you feel like this would profoundly influence on the synthesis of science and spirituality and neuro-tech to maximize human flourishing. And support Jay at the links below in the bio. And that is all, folks. Jay, I'm going to end the stream, but stay in the studio for another minute with me, okay? All right, well, thanks. This was a beautiful conversation. Great questions. And yeah, I would do this every week if there was time. So let's do it again sometime soon. I love you so much, bro. We're on the exact same science spirituality. Actually, Shins and Young, I believe, was the one that said that quote about, it's the only trillion dollar idea is the synthesis of science spirituality. That's right. So good. We're on it. We're on it. You'll see us back again soon, fam. Yeah, thank you. Much love. Thanks, Jay.